Last week, I was sitting in my philosophy course on my last day of undergraduate classes. I was expecting a class that would give us a review for the final exam, and the usual lecture and note taking. I was wrong.

Instead, we were handed an article, told to read it, and we sat in silence.

The article was by David Foster Wallace titled on Life and Work. A copy of it can be found here. I'm not going to re-iterate the entire article, but I will say it is worth the read. Here's the main idea.

We are all living at the center of our own universe. Everything we perceive is by and large our conscious decision to interpret and react to it. And because of that, we often let some stupid unnecessary situation negatively effect us for the rest of our day. We see the checkout lines in the grocery store as annoying, the person tailgating us on the road is a jack***, and everyone is just in our way.

Because some of us won't get that job that we've worked so hard for. Some of us will never have our dreams come true and throughout time, a lot of us will just mentally shut down.

Twenty years from now some of us will have taken a life path that wasn't expected; accepted a job that we didn't even go to school for, and be living a somewhat boring, routine, mundane life. We end up not seeing anything through anyone else's perception, and we end up walking around like a real version of "The Walking Dead." Day in and day out.

Hard pill to swallow, huh?

I sat in the back of the classroom. When my professor started speaking, he had every single students attention. He explained he didn't want to discourage us, or scare us, or make us miserable before we had the chance to get out into the world. He wanted to give us all a solution.

As Wallace explains in his article, my professor further supported that we must cultivate vigilance. That means making the conscious decision that we will pay attention to the universe that is around us. Practice thoughts of seeing a situation, and taking ourselves out of our own universe to see the bigger picture.

We get so wrapped up in our mundane life that we forget to think about other people. We never truly know what anyone else around us is going through because we don't take the time to consider it. The point is not to be a better person morally. The point is to realize that there is more to life than your own life.

For those of you graduating, I hope you see this in the light that I did. We are not all going to get our dream job a week after we cross the stage and receive our diploma. We are going to encounter struggles and hardships that are far beyond whatever we had imagined. We will live a routine. We will (hopefully) have a career that puts food on the table, and for most of us will be content.

I say this. Do not settle for content. Settle for happy. Settle for being aware. Care about other people. Settle for living a life where you see the world around you and take in all of the good, all of the bad, and remind yourself life is too short to waste getting angry because something didn't work out that would greater serve you.

What I'm trying to emphasize is to see outside of your universe. Do not let the troubles of life make you forget all of the good. The world is too big to only think about yourself all of the time.