The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.... The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.... The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness.

from David Foster Wallace's THIS IS WATER commencement speech
(i'm into the first 150 pages of INIFINITE JEST, which I've learned is in a style called hysterical realism)