Awesome article. As a total DFWhead, I wanted to add a few more from his fiction, since I think that's become under discussed thanks to all of his amazing essays and interviews.
9. Depression Feels Like Truth
The short story "The Depressed Person" from Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is largely a demonstration of this point, explaining the various degrees depressed people go to convince everyone in their life that their worldview is purely fact-based, and how apt the mind it at convincing you it's right about everything, permanently.
10. Suicide Is A Constant Temptation--And Its Temptation Is Oblivious To Those Around You
"Good Old Neon" (from the story collection Oblivion), is a first-person monologue of Neal, a handsome, smart, successful man who struggles with impostor syndrome and feels like a complete fraud. He eventually decides to kill himself in a car accident and as the frame drops, we realize the story is actually a writing exercise from the perspective of David Wallace, who was desperate to understand why someone who had such a good life on the outside succumbed to suicide. Of course, this is only made more haunting by the fact that four years after the story's publication, Macarthur-winning best-selling author and happily married David Foster Wallace killed himself too.
11. Attention Is More Important Than Intellect
The Pale King, DFW's unfinished final novel, follows a group of Midwestern IRS agents to show, essentially, what it is like to be bored out of your mind. Chris Fogle, a drifting, distracted young man is treated as a hero as he struggles to find focus in the midst of paperwork, exams, and endless bureaucratic repetition. One scene stands out: watching As the World Turns in his dorm, Fogle realizes his own aimlessness isn’t just adolescent laziness, it's nihilism. He learns that paying attention, even to the dullest tasks, is a choice that creates meaning, and that heroism can exist in mundane work if you engage with it fully. Wallace repeatedly returns to these repeated forms, drills, and rituals to show that sustaining attention is the real work of life.
12. Surrender, Not Smarts, Leads To Survival
In Infinite Jest, DFW's magnum opus, Don Gately is a recovering addict, former burglar, and live-in staffer at Ennet House, a sober living facility. Early in the novel, he struggles to stay clean while facing constant temptation and the consequences of his past, including violent confrontations and the shadow of his own self-destructiveness. He eventually realizes that his intellect alone can never outsmart his addiction, it will only feed it. What enables his survival (and triumph) is embracing the simple, ritualized structure of AA: repetitive steps, corny slogans, routines, and service to others. Wallace shows that meaningfulness and resilience come not from cleverness or insight but from disciplined attention and humble surrender. Like all of his fiction, DFW's lessons here came from his own life: Infinite Jest was based on his struggles to get clean before writing the novel (and his amateur tennis career, of course!).
Thanks for this. Especially the final point. The repetition. I think we all sense this but imagine life is meant to be grander. Getting a sixpack seems like some kind of amazing dynamic goal, glamorous in a sense. But it really means several years of hard exercise and a consistently strict diet. It is boring and repetitive.
I also think part of our crisis is low boredom thresholds. These too are destroyed by screen addiction.
And when you get the sixpack you realize just how little it actually changes your life. It's just another experience you had, just another box you checked, and the reasons you had for doing it are—on further examination—about as empty as all the reasons you had for doing anything else. Because you wanted to.
Unless you're also incredibly shallow or desperate, it's not like you're going to start spontaneously liking the girls whose only reason for being attracted to you is because you have a sixpack.
Yes. Or, to put it another way, the pursuit of goals, and the effort needed to achieve them, helps you assess what actually matters. I am sure many have started out pursuing sixpacks or other shallow goals only to realize the real reward of their efforts was strength, energy, dynamism and confidence.
Thanks to Ted for this article, and to your comment for providing additional insights. I have to say, the most sobering and disturbing aspect of reading these points is that he appeared to have clarity on what the problems were and what the solutions were, and yet that knowledge was not enough to stave off the demons that ultimately drove him to do what he did.
And it's disturbing not just because of what it says about his decision-making process and fate, but what it says for our outlook as well.
Many of the constructive answers and solutions that are implicit in his deliberations are resonant with those offered by the more deep spiritual practices of monastic and ascetical Christianity as well as Stoic philosophy.
Who's to say if he could have staved off the demons were it not for his suffering from psychiatric drug withdrawal. His suicide happened after coming off an antidepressant, a process which can send people to depths of misery many times worse than they experienced prior to the drug.
I wonder a lot if DFW was a Christian. He was certainly on that track intellectually—probably emotionally, too, given how he obviously loved and dignified his characters—and his favorite book was The Screwtape Letters. Not that that makes someone a Christian, but it’s a clue.
I don't know if he was a christian, but according to The Last Tour (the movie at least) he had the st ignatius prayer ("Lord, teach me to be generous...") on his bathroom wall.
WORD! And thx for mentioning "The Pale King" = I read it on a flight from Munich to SF and although IJ will always be the work I hold most dearly, Pale King is insanely good and important!
“At a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by by people who do not love us but want our money.”
I think about this all the time. The more we tolerate it the easier it gets to accept.
Screens don’t just isolate us from each other. They flatten the way we experience time.
In real life, memory and presence weave together. You sit with a friend, and the conversation carries echoes of yesterday while pointing toward tomorrow. But screens break that. Everything is either a flash in the feed, forgotten in seconds, or an archive you scroll back through, frozen and lifeless.
It creates a strange kind of loneliness where even your own life feels disconnected from itself.
That’s why young people often feel like they’re drifting. It isn’t only the lack of friends. It’s the loss of a shared rhythm of time. Without embodied presence to tie past, present, and future together, you’re left with fragments.
The heart can’t live on fragments. It longs for a story.
David Wallace's problem and his peers problems sound like hormone problems, indoor lifestyle, indoor lighting. Wrecking people's dopamine levels is how the body is entrained and addicted to screentime. When your hormones are wrecked horror and depression feel like truth; significant pain is the only thing that can bring you a full presence of mind. You need an emergency, or you need extreme stimulation(like drugs) just to have a functioning mind; otherwise there simply isn't enough dopamine/b-endorphins floating around your brain. Then you instinctually seek more screen time because it stimulates your dopamine in-the-moment, but it makes it worse in the long run.
The listlessness isn't because life sucks it's because being in a body with completely wrecked hormones sucks. I love the 90s I'm a musician I devoted significant years of my life to "depressing Music". But I don't believe the solution to these extreme emotional problems is art/therapy/philosophy directly (although good and essential things to pursue; these solutions easily rabbit-hole into infinity, and polite society already wants to ignore the obvious factor of pollution and poison in environment and food supply). I think environment, and food are the biggest levers. #1 thing that people do not yet accept or understand is how essential sunlight is to hormonal health. Artificial light is bad. Filtered sunlight is bad. Diabetes, heart-attacks are exacerbated by indoor light(cholesterol is a pre-cursor before getting turned into vitamin D). Vitamin D isn't a vitamin it's a hormone that only gets made and processed correctly in-sunlight. Blue light increase blood sugar levels. Your body makes dopamine, and b-endorphins from peak-sun exposure on the skin. Humans are designed to be addicted to sun-light not opiates.
Apologies for the shameless self promo, but Something To Do With Paying Attention is Wallace’s masterwork and should be read by every high school senior in the country
That's a great place to start with David Foster Wallace. I've given that book out as gifts to young people. I agree that it would be a good choice for high school students—but really it's for everybody.
"And finally, on a personal level, we can embrace Wallace’s plea for more kindness and compassion. We don’t need anybody’s permission to do that, and we can start immediately."
Can't help making the connection in these trying times that the cardinal stoic virtue of justice is grounded in kindness and compassion. Thank you, Ted, for not just reminding us, but exhorting us, to see that the road to a well lived life is filled with love, culture and individual acts of kindness.
Right on. He also wrote that we'll be unable to govern ourselves or thrive without a Democratic Spirit, which he defined as "“one that combines rigor and humility, i.e., passionate conviction plus a sedulous respect for the convictions of others.” That's from Authority And American Usage (collected in Consider the Lobster), one of the greatest essays of the 20th century and one I read every couple of years as this shit show gets ever more grim in just the ways DFW feared.
Sometimes i wonder whats the point in stuff like this. Both wallaces writing and stuff like this article. Everybody knowingly says yeees.. and go right back to the same old shit. Nobody ever listens to *timely* advice. I probably wouldnt either, unless i already pretty much agreed with it.
So yeah, lots of people, well known or not, have been warning us about wtf is going to happen to us if we continue on a path. Its not that hard to see, if ones paying attention.
Seems like the only thing to come out of it is getting to say i told you so, something wallace missed out on, and something nobody likes.
People dont like the advice, or the reminder theyve been so advised. I guess they just *want* to do the shit they do(again, me too).
I guess theres an entertainment element to stuff like this. Theres like a oooo! vibe to predictions come true. And you really cant make this shit up. But humans as a whole are about as dense as they come
The purpose always is to provide a feeling you're not alone, insight, and tools to those who desire to exercise their free will for positive change. A change that always has to start inside the individual. It occurs as a choice. Once made and fostered, the life of the individual becomes an example for others. But each "other" must make a personal choice too. Most will not or find it too difficult to stay the course and fall back into the torrent of "it's what everyone is doing".
Articles like this give those who are in or fall back into the torrent a branch to grasp and pull themselves out of the flow. One person at a time is how real lasting change builds in a society. It's why algorithms are successful. People make a choice, a click, which leads to more choices or clicks. Soon, you no longer are exercising a free will but a programming to which your not privy only reactive. To impose change from the top almost always fails, or worse, becomes abused by a few to the detriment of the many. A great majority will just accept whatever is happening. They'll relish in the hopelessness because it gives them an opportunity to ignore their responsibilty for where they are, to blame someone else for their inability to choose what was best for them and the consequences of going against the flow.
"The purpose always is to provide a feeling you're not alone"... is this a joke? Either way, its funny.
"People make a choice, a click, which leads to more choices or clicks"... yes, this describes exactly whats going on here on substack. This and practically nothing more.
"They'll relish in the hopelessness because it gives them an opportunity to ignore their responsibilty for where they are, to blame someone else for their inability to choose what was best for them and the consequences of going against the flow."... this is right imo. But what it says is alot of people are sheep. The sheep people arent snatching themselves out of the torrent with this branch or any others. People that will do that dont need these branches.
All of this, the article, the comments, this conversation we're having, its all part of the torrent. Theres no branches to be found here
Well at least you're admitting you don't know why you're here either.
And you seem annoyed that people keep saying that if you make up the justifications yourself, it gives the justifications you made up more meaning.
I agree.
We're all here wasting time this way because there isn't a more pleasurable way to waste time right now with which we would prefer to be engaged. All of this is voluntary.
Except it's not. Some marketer smarter than us deployed this apparatus at us, and sucked us in, and it soothes our ego to believe we are making a choice to be here, expressing our emotions on an article the author is using to drive interest, attention, and ultimately money into his bank account, and/or influence in the world he's made his home.
I’m here because it’s hard to find people to have thoughtful conversations with, especially since my companion with whom I had these kind of conversations died. Also, I never read Infinite Jest so it’s been interesting to learn what his writings were about. Is this a waste of my time?
It is not a waste of time if you can dog ear a corner of a page and close the book, set it down, ruminate and hopefully share thoughts with another reader. I had multiple page markers tucked in IJ and frequently went back to passages prior to finishing the novel which, I am not ashamed to state, does not need to be finished to be appreciated.
Very true. We all know the prescription to turn off the glowing screens and go out to touch grass. We all know tech is bad for us, but we will fight to the death anybody who wants to take it from us. I agree with your last sentence about humans being about as dense as they come. I remember a professor saying in class (can't even remember the subject now), "you can't put the genie back into the bottle." We all know the saying, "just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you should." But with humans, because you can do something........... you will. Look at how we're merrily heading to our destruction with AI. Anybody with half a brain can see how screwed we are.
We’re living in David Foster Wallace’s future. Unfortunately, the stakes are higher than many seem to recognize.
Nita Farahany, a Duke law professor, argues the next frontier isn’t screens, it’s our minds. In The Battle for Your Brain, she makes the case for preserving our “cognitive liberty”, the right to think freely in an age when neurotechnology and AI are learning to read, nudge, and even rewrite our mental states.
Farahany warns that neural interfaces and brain-data platforms may soon threaten our very autonomy, not just our attention. The same corporate incentives DFW called “sinister” now have the potential to bypass our eyes and go straight to our neurons.
So yes, as a baseline, we need DFW’s notions of art and compassion as means to resist the tech machine. But as Farahany implores, we also need legal rights, safeguards, and accountability to keep our thoughts free from capture.
From the good folks at the Center for Human Technology:
It didn't start yesterday, and it won't start tomorrow.
But corporations clearly, intentionally, used psychologists to figure out how best to make us consumers, and then used politicians to organize society around what they learned.
So I would argue that our thoughts haven't been free from capture for decades.
We think about what corporations want us to think about.
But isn’t it also about our own survival in the current US economy? If we don’t get on board and become part of the problem then we aren’t rewarded with non homelessness and homelessness is next to criminality in today’s monetized society. Just a thought and throwing it out there to join the conversation and see what others think. IJ was a life changing experience for me and DFW like so many greats are no longer here to help us, in person at least and I hate that. I miss so many of the greats I looked up to like Philip Seymour Hoffman. What someone said about it all being about hormones and what we use or ingest is interesting to consider too. IJ was so funny at times especially for someone that understands or has experienced drug addiction in America. DFW was/is a saint. That’s all I’ve got for now.
Yesterday in my English Composition course at my university, we read through as a class (out loud) his piece, "Plain Old Untrendy Troubles and Emotions"--this was the first time many of my peers have heard or read any of his material. Based off of our class discussion that followed the reading, I can safely say that his relevance is still here today among Gen-Zers (like myself).
I stumbled onto "What's Trending" by Sol Sidran the 11-year old daughter of jazzer Leo Sidran back before the summer. This seems like a good point in a necessary discussion to provide a link to such a smile....
“What’s Trending” is Leo Sidran’s response to the Dave Frishberg/Bob Dorough classic “I’m Hip” (made famous by Blossom Dearie). It was inspired by Sol, Leo’s 11 year old daughter, who is the ultimate trend follower. She’s always showing him some new dance or internet phenomenon, and always armed with the phrase “look at this, it’s trending.”
Powerful, Ted. Thanks for sharing. I'll make a point of getting to know DFW's material much better. I'm at work presently reviewing a few drafts of an RFP I'm submitting next week, and my team has only assembled what is clearly digital AI slop. My message to my team: where is the "human" in this narrative? If we are going to not only differentiate ourselves but indeed survive, we have to lean hard - if not exclusively - into that which makes us human, connected, engaged, capable of emotion, etc.
Truth. Technology isolates. It offers continual distraction. Neil Postman had much the same concerns in his book 'Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business'... published in 1985. The dilemma may be in observing that it's all well and good to conclude that there is no guarantee of happiness in life, and that Meaning lies outside of oneself, beyond any collection of brightly-lit screens... but seeing very few others choosing to walk that lonely road less traveled.
It seems much too easy to call everything an addiction and then remove responsibility from the user and from the parent who gives their kids the screens in the first place. We can all recognize our own responsiblity. No one has to use social media. It's really not that entertaining.
Oh my gosh! I so hope you enjoy it. I’ve read it twice and it might be time for a reread. I recommend keeping a bookmark in the footnotes section as you read.
Also don’t feel bad if you just skip some or all the foot notes. I kind of did a combo-it’s whatever works but it’s kind of two parallel works the story and the explaining of the thought of the story in the footnotes so to speak.
The next real literary "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that'll be the point. Maybe that's why they'll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today's risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the "Oh how banal". To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.
A DFW piece is always timely. He must be sipped slowly and savored. It can be exhausting, and inspiring. Even his reports from the Vegas Porn convention were profound. His screen warnings are coming true at the speed of chips…and we all know...but thats why they call it addiction. We’re hooked. Its baked in. We read this on a screen. There is no evil plot, there’s only the profit motive. Maybe our AI robot buddies will reconnect us.
I once cobbled together random lines of his into a my ears only tribute piece about suicide that I revisit from time to time just to swim in it. And speaking of swimming, his “What is water” is worth the search…but you’ll need a screen.
Awesome article. As a total DFWhead, I wanted to add a few more from his fiction, since I think that's become under discussed thanks to all of his amazing essays and interviews.
9. Depression Feels Like Truth
The short story "The Depressed Person" from Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is largely a demonstration of this point, explaining the various degrees depressed people go to convince everyone in their life that their worldview is purely fact-based, and how apt the mind it at convincing you it's right about everything, permanently.
10. Suicide Is A Constant Temptation--And Its Temptation Is Oblivious To Those Around You
"Good Old Neon" (from the story collection Oblivion), is a first-person monologue of Neal, a handsome, smart, successful man who struggles with impostor syndrome and feels like a complete fraud. He eventually decides to kill himself in a car accident and as the frame drops, we realize the story is actually a writing exercise from the perspective of David Wallace, who was desperate to understand why someone who had such a good life on the outside succumbed to suicide. Of course, this is only made more haunting by the fact that four years after the story's publication, Macarthur-winning best-selling author and happily married David Foster Wallace killed himself too.
11. Attention Is More Important Than Intellect
The Pale King, DFW's unfinished final novel, follows a group of Midwestern IRS agents to show, essentially, what it is like to be bored out of your mind. Chris Fogle, a drifting, distracted young man is treated as a hero as he struggles to find focus in the midst of paperwork, exams, and endless bureaucratic repetition. One scene stands out: watching As the World Turns in his dorm, Fogle realizes his own aimlessness isn’t just adolescent laziness, it's nihilism. He learns that paying attention, even to the dullest tasks, is a choice that creates meaning, and that heroism can exist in mundane work if you engage with it fully. Wallace repeatedly returns to these repeated forms, drills, and rituals to show that sustaining attention is the real work of life.
12. Surrender, Not Smarts, Leads To Survival
In Infinite Jest, DFW's magnum opus, Don Gately is a recovering addict, former burglar, and live-in staffer at Ennet House, a sober living facility. Early in the novel, he struggles to stay clean while facing constant temptation and the consequences of his past, including violent confrontations and the shadow of his own self-destructiveness. He eventually realizes that his intellect alone can never outsmart his addiction, it will only feed it. What enables his survival (and triumph) is embracing the simple, ritualized structure of AA: repetitive steps, corny slogans, routines, and service to others. Wallace shows that meaningfulness and resilience come not from cleverness or insight but from disciplined attention and humble surrender. Like all of his fiction, DFW's lessons here came from his own life: Infinite Jest was based on his struggles to get clean before writing the novel (and his amateur tennis career, of course!).
Thanks for this. Especially the final point. The repetition. I think we all sense this but imagine life is meant to be grander. Getting a sixpack seems like some kind of amazing dynamic goal, glamorous in a sense. But it really means several years of hard exercise and a consistently strict diet. It is boring and repetitive.
I also think part of our crisis is low boredom thresholds. These too are destroyed by screen addiction.
And when you get the sixpack you realize just how little it actually changes your life. It's just another experience you had, just another box you checked, and the reasons you had for doing it are—on further examination—about as empty as all the reasons you had for doing anything else. Because you wanted to.
Unless you're also incredibly shallow or desperate, it's not like you're going to start spontaneously liking the girls whose only reason for being attracted to you is because you have a sixpack.
Yes. Or, to put it another way, the pursuit of goals, and the effort needed to achieve them, helps you assess what actually matters. I am sure many have started out pursuing sixpacks or other shallow goals only to realize the real reward of their efforts was strength, energy, dynamism and confidence.
So even shallowish goals help improve us.
Thanks to Ted for this article, and to your comment for providing additional insights. I have to say, the most sobering and disturbing aspect of reading these points is that he appeared to have clarity on what the problems were and what the solutions were, and yet that knowledge was not enough to stave off the demons that ultimately drove him to do what he did.
And it's disturbing not just because of what it says about his decision-making process and fate, but what it says for our outlook as well.
Many of the constructive answers and solutions that are implicit in his deliberations are resonant with those offered by the more deep spiritual practices of monastic and ascetical Christianity as well as Stoic philosophy.
Who's to say if he could have staved off the demons were it not for his suffering from psychiatric drug withdrawal. His suicide happened after coming off an antidepressant, a process which can send people to depths of misery many times worse than they experienced prior to the drug.
I wonder a lot if DFW was a Christian. He was certainly on that track intellectually—probably emotionally, too, given how he obviously loved and dignified his characters—and his favorite book was The Screwtape Letters. Not that that makes someone a Christian, but it’s a clue.
I don't know if he was a christian, but according to The Last Tour (the movie at least) he had the st ignatius prayer ("Lord, teach me to be generous...") on his bathroom wall.
This is wonderfully written. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts.
WORD! And thx for mentioning "The Pale King" = I read it on a flight from Munich to SF and although IJ will always be the work I hold most dearly, Pale King is insanely good and important!
It's Chris Fogle.
~ your attention is your greatest gift. ~
“At a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by by people who do not love us but want our money.”
I think about this all the time. The more we tolerate it the easier it gets to accept.
Thank you for writing this.
Screens don’t just isolate us from each other. They flatten the way we experience time.
In real life, memory and presence weave together. You sit with a friend, and the conversation carries echoes of yesterday while pointing toward tomorrow. But screens break that. Everything is either a flash in the feed, forgotten in seconds, or an archive you scroll back through, frozen and lifeless.
It creates a strange kind of loneliness where even your own life feels disconnected from itself.
That’s why young people often feel like they’re drifting. It isn’t only the lack of friends. It’s the loss of a shared rhythm of time. Without embodied presence to tie past, present, and future together, you’re left with fragments.
The heart can’t live on fragments. It longs for a story.
Screens do perhaps more than flattening time; they flatten the experience of life itself. Wonderfully written comment by the way
A very useful comment.
David Wallace's problem and his peers problems sound like hormone problems, indoor lifestyle, indoor lighting. Wrecking people's dopamine levels is how the body is entrained and addicted to screentime. When your hormones are wrecked horror and depression feel like truth; significant pain is the only thing that can bring you a full presence of mind. You need an emergency, or you need extreme stimulation(like drugs) just to have a functioning mind; otherwise there simply isn't enough dopamine/b-endorphins floating around your brain. Then you instinctually seek more screen time because it stimulates your dopamine in-the-moment, but it makes it worse in the long run.
The listlessness isn't because life sucks it's because being in a body with completely wrecked hormones sucks. I love the 90s I'm a musician I devoted significant years of my life to "depressing Music". But I don't believe the solution to these extreme emotional problems is art/therapy/philosophy directly (although good and essential things to pursue; these solutions easily rabbit-hole into infinity, and polite society already wants to ignore the obvious factor of pollution and poison in environment and food supply). I think environment, and food are the biggest levers. #1 thing that people do not yet accept or understand is how essential sunlight is to hormonal health. Artificial light is bad. Filtered sunlight is bad. Diabetes, heart-attacks are exacerbated by indoor light(cholesterol is a pre-cursor before getting turned into vitamin D). Vitamin D isn't a vitamin it's a hormone that only gets made and processed correctly in-sunlight. Blue light increase blood sugar levels. Your body makes dopamine, and b-endorphins from peak-sun exposure on the skin. Humans are designed to be addicted to sun-light not opiates.
Excellent observation! Justi
Apologies for the shameless self promo, but Something To Do With Paying Attention is Wallace’s masterwork and should be read by every high school senior in the country
https://open.substack.com/pub/afailedcomedian/p/what-should-teenagers-be-reading?r=q3t7x&utm_medium=ios
That's a great place to start with David Foster Wallace. I've given that book out as gifts to young people. I agree that it would be a good choice for high school students—but really it's for everybody.
The Pale King is the only DFW book I haven't read, but thanks to your note, I'll be reading STDWPA in the near future.
"And finally, on a personal level, we can embrace Wallace’s plea for more kindness and compassion. We don’t need anybody’s permission to do that, and we can start immediately."
Can't help making the connection in these trying times that the cardinal stoic virtue of justice is grounded in kindness and compassion. Thank you, Ted, for not just reminding us, but exhorting us, to see that the road to a well lived life is filled with love, culture and individual acts of kindness.
Right on. He also wrote that we'll be unable to govern ourselves or thrive without a Democratic Spirit, which he defined as "“one that combines rigor and humility, i.e., passionate conviction plus a sedulous respect for the convictions of others.” That's from Authority And American Usage (collected in Consider the Lobster), one of the greatest essays of the 20th century and one I read every couple of years as this shit show gets ever more grim in just the ways DFW feared.
Sometimes i wonder whats the point in stuff like this. Both wallaces writing and stuff like this article. Everybody knowingly says yeees.. and go right back to the same old shit. Nobody ever listens to *timely* advice. I probably wouldnt either, unless i already pretty much agreed with it.
So yeah, lots of people, well known or not, have been warning us about wtf is going to happen to us if we continue on a path. Its not that hard to see, if ones paying attention.
Seems like the only thing to come out of it is getting to say i told you so, something wallace missed out on, and something nobody likes.
People dont like the advice, or the reminder theyve been so advised. I guess they just *want* to do the shit they do(again, me too).
I guess theres an entertainment element to stuff like this. Theres like a oooo! vibe to predictions come true. And you really cant make this shit up. But humans as a whole are about as dense as they come
The purpose always is to provide a feeling you're not alone, insight, and tools to those who desire to exercise their free will for positive change. A change that always has to start inside the individual. It occurs as a choice. Once made and fostered, the life of the individual becomes an example for others. But each "other" must make a personal choice too. Most will not or find it too difficult to stay the course and fall back into the torrent of "it's what everyone is doing".
Articles like this give those who are in or fall back into the torrent a branch to grasp and pull themselves out of the flow. One person at a time is how real lasting change builds in a society. It's why algorithms are successful. People make a choice, a click, which leads to more choices or clicks. Soon, you no longer are exercising a free will but a programming to which your not privy only reactive. To impose change from the top almost always fails, or worse, becomes abused by a few to the detriment of the many. A great majority will just accept whatever is happening. They'll relish in the hopelessness because it gives them an opportunity to ignore their responsibilty for where they are, to blame someone else for their inability to choose what was best for them and the consequences of going against the flow.
"The purpose always is to provide a feeling you're not alone"... is this a joke? Either way, its funny.
"People make a choice, a click, which leads to more choices or clicks"... yes, this describes exactly whats going on here on substack. This and practically nothing more.
"They'll relish in the hopelessness because it gives them an opportunity to ignore their responsibilty for where they are, to blame someone else for their inability to choose what was best for them and the consequences of going against the flow."... this is right imo. But what it says is alot of people are sheep. The sheep people arent snatching themselves out of the torrent with this branch or any others. People that will do that dont need these branches.
All of this, the article, the comments, this conversation we're having, its all part of the torrent. Theres no branches to be found here
Well at least you're admitting you don't know why you're here either.
And you seem annoyed that people keep saying that if you make up the justifications yourself, it gives the justifications you made up more meaning.
I agree.
We're all here wasting time this way because there isn't a more pleasurable way to waste time right now with which we would prefer to be engaged. All of this is voluntary.
Except it's not. Some marketer smarter than us deployed this apparatus at us, and sucked us in, and it soothes our ego to believe we are making a choice to be here, expressing our emotions on an article the author is using to drive interest, attention, and ultimately money into his bank account, and/or influence in the world he's made his home.
I’m here because it’s hard to find people to have thoughtful conversations with, especially since my companion with whom I had these kind of conversations died. Also, I never read Infinite Jest so it’s been interesting to learn what his writings were about. Is this a waste of my time?
It is not a waste of time if you can dog ear a corner of a page and close the book, set it down, ruminate and hopefully share thoughts with another reader. I had multiple page markers tucked in IJ and frequently went back to passages prior to finishing the novel which, I am not ashamed to state, does not need to be finished to be appreciated.
My condolences. I hope you find peace, and another friend.
You said it brother, better than i did lol
Very true. We all know the prescription to turn off the glowing screens and go out to touch grass. We all know tech is bad for us, but we will fight to the death anybody who wants to take it from us. I agree with your last sentence about humans being about as dense as they come. I remember a professor saying in class (can't even remember the subject now), "you can't put the genie back into the bottle." We all know the saying, "just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you should." But with humans, because you can do something........... you will. Look at how we're merrily heading to our destruction with AI. Anybody with half a brain can see how screwed we are.
We’re living in David Foster Wallace’s future. Unfortunately, the stakes are higher than many seem to recognize.
Nita Farahany, a Duke law professor, argues the next frontier isn’t screens, it’s our minds. In The Battle for Your Brain, she makes the case for preserving our “cognitive liberty”, the right to think freely in an age when neurotechnology and AI are learning to read, nudge, and even rewrite our mental states.
Farahany warns that neural interfaces and brain-data platforms may soon threaten our very autonomy, not just our attention. The same corporate incentives DFW called “sinister” now have the potential to bypass our eyes and go straight to our neurons.
So yes, as a baseline, we need DFW’s notions of art and compassion as means to resist the tech machine. But as Farahany implores, we also need legal rights, safeguards, and accountability to keep our thoughts free from capture.
From the good folks at the Center for Human Technology:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjspyHtQam8
Thanks for this rec. Not on my radar, though the concept is very much on my mind (pun truly not intended).
This is, to me, almost right.
It didn't start yesterday, and it won't start tomorrow.
But corporations clearly, intentionally, used psychologists to figure out how best to make us consumers, and then used politicians to organize society around what they learned.
So I would argue that our thoughts haven't been free from capture for decades.
We think about what corporations want us to think about.
The news cycle isn't coincidental.
As Ted has pointed out at least once, I believe.
But isn’t it also about our own survival in the current US economy? If we don’t get on board and become part of the problem then we aren’t rewarded with non homelessness and homelessness is next to criminality in today’s monetized society. Just a thought and throwing it out there to join the conversation and see what others think. IJ was a life changing experience for me and DFW like so many greats are no longer here to help us, in person at least and I hate that. I miss so many of the greats I looked up to like Philip Seymour Hoffman. What someone said about it all being about hormones and what we use or ingest is interesting to consider too. IJ was so funny at times especially for someone that understands or has experienced drug addiction in America. DFW was/is a saint. That’s all I’ve got for now.
Yesterday in my English Composition course at my university, we read through as a class (out loud) his piece, "Plain Old Untrendy Troubles and Emotions"--this was the first time many of my peers have heard or read any of his material. Based off of our class discussion that followed the reading, I can safely say that his relevance is still here today among Gen-Zers (like myself).
I stumbled onto "What's Trending" by Sol Sidran the 11-year old daughter of jazzer Leo Sidran back before the summer. This seems like a good point in a necessary discussion to provide a link to such a smile....
Warmly this Indian Summer,
Via
Tio Mitchito ™
Mitch Ritter\Paradigm Sifters, Code Shifters, PsalmSong Chasers
Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa (Refuge of A-Tone-ment Seekers)
Media Discussion List\Looksee
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1x0qGYn9_w0
Leo Sidran - What's Trending (Feat. Sol Sidran, Michael Leonhart)
BONSAIMUSIC
8.51K subscribers
3,892 views Premiered Mar 9, 2023
"What's Trending"
Leo Sidran (Feat. Sol Sidran & Michael Leonhart)
⏭ Available on all platforms here ♫: https://idol-io.link/WhatsTrending
“What’s Trending” is Leo Sidran’s response to the Dave Frishberg/Bob Dorough classic “I’m Hip” (made famous by Blossom Dearie). It was inspired by Sol, Leo’s 11 year old daughter, who is the ultimate trend follower. She’s always showing him some new dance or internet phenomenon, and always armed with the phrase “look at this, it’s trending.”
Video directed by Leo Sidran
filmed at Market Market, Palm Springs, CA
Michael Leonhart: brass
Sol Sidran: featured vocal
Leo Sidran: all other instruments and vocals
Mixed by Leo Sidran and John Fields
Powerful, Ted. Thanks for sharing. I'll make a point of getting to know DFW's material much better. I'm at work presently reviewing a few drafts of an RFP I'm submitting next week, and my team has only assembled what is clearly digital AI slop. My message to my team: where is the "human" in this narrative? If we are going to not only differentiate ourselves but indeed survive, we have to lean hard - if not exclusively - into that which makes us human, connected, engaged, capable of emotion, etc.
Truth. Technology isolates. It offers continual distraction. Neil Postman had much the same concerns in his book 'Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business'... published in 1985. The dilemma may be in observing that it's all well and good to conclude that there is no guarantee of happiness in life, and that Meaning lies outside of oneself, beyond any collection of brightly-lit screens... but seeing very few others choosing to walk that lonely road less traveled.
It seems much too easy to call everything an addiction and then remove responsibility from the user and from the parent who gives their kids the screens in the first place. We can all recognize our own responsiblity. No one has to use social media. It's really not that entertaining.
🤣
Facts. 💯
Just pulled Infinite Jest from it's shelf last night; picked it up at McKays a couple a months ago. I'll take this essay as a sign to dive in.
Oh my gosh! I so hope you enjoy it. I’ve read it twice and it might be time for a reread. I recommend keeping a bookmark in the footnotes section as you read.
Thanks for the tip. I'll do that.
Also don’t feel bad if you just skip some or all the foot notes. I kind of did a combo-it’s whatever works but it’s kind of two parallel works the story and the explaining of the thought of the story in the footnotes so to speak.
DFW was a visionary who died too young. “Federer as a religious experience” was a masterpiece. Here is a similar piece on Alcaraz: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/carlos-alcaraz-white-pill
The next real literary "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that'll be the point. Maybe that's why they'll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today's risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the "Oh how banal". To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.
― David Foster Wallace,
A DFW piece is always timely. He must be sipped slowly and savored. It can be exhausting, and inspiring. Even his reports from the Vegas Porn convention were profound. His screen warnings are coming true at the speed of chips…and we all know...but thats why they call it addiction. We’re hooked. Its baked in. We read this on a screen. There is no evil plot, there’s only the profit motive. Maybe our AI robot buddies will reconnect us.
I once cobbled together random lines of his into a my ears only tribute piece about suicide that I revisit from time to time just to swim in it. And speaking of swimming, his “What is water” is worth the search…but you’ll need a screen.