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Persuasive Speech

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Actively choosing what to think is maybe one of the most important and yet challenging and exhausting things we must do. David Foster Wallace talks about just that in his commencement speech at Kenyon University in 2005. Reading this confronted me about how easy it is for me to get comfortable in my default setting, of letting myself think about the world in a self-centric way. It’s the person sitting beside me in class smacking their gum, who is clearly doing it just to annoy me, smacking louder each time. It’s the preconceived plan of the group of high school students walking slowly in a group through the mall to irritate me when all I want to do is buy my rain boots and leave. I can so easily wrap myself up in thinking that everyone is out to hurt me. I repetitively fall into the trap of thinking that whenever plans fall through with friends; It is not because the person was really too tired or an assignment came up or something logical like that. No, it always has to do with me. It is because that person does not want to hang out with me or I offend them by something I’ve done. They want to hurt me, they want to hang out with other people. It hurts, every time, but it’s me who causes myself that pain. I am the one who made it up. I forget that though, probably 9 times out of 10 that person just needed alone time or to get a few more hours of sleep. They are not seeking out ways to hurt me. I make these small, insignificant decisions and changes into the end of the

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