Infinite Jest
0.
You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.
—David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Ten thousand years ago—which is nothing, in evolutionary terms—life is almost four billion years old, so 10,000 years is nothing. Ten thousand years ago, our ancestors numbered maybe 10 million people all over the world. And their best technologies were flint knives and spears. Now, we have almost 10 billion people, and we have nuclear missiles and spaceships and supercomputers and so forth. We are thousands of times more powerful. It should be said, though, that we are not significantly happier. And that's a very important thing to realize about history and about life in general. That power and happiness don't always go together. Humans are extremely good at acquiring more power, but we are not good at all in translating power into happiness. So, we are thousands of times more powerful than our ancestors in the Stone Age, but we are not thousands of times more happy. And as we look to the future, I think it's likely that we will become even more powerful in the future. We will be like gods in terms of the power we have. But we will probably be dissatisfied gods, miserable gods.
—Yuval Noah Harari (source)
You attain the goal and realize the shocking realization that attaining the goal does not complete or redeem you, does not make everything for your life “OK ” as you are, in the culture, educated to assume it will do this, the goal. And then you face this fact that what you had thought would have the meaning does not have the meaning when you get it, and you are impaled by shock.
—David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
1.
Six months ago, I was granted a 10-day reprieve from the screen-heavy obligations of my day job, which some of you will know involves working with a nonprofit media org focused on the world’s progress. As well as taking the time off from work, I decided to take a break from my computer. The first few days without it were welcome, despite something feeling vaguely off, vaguely absent. Very quickly, though, those phantom feelings gave way to richer and more distinct ones. Ones of being rehabbed, which were interrupted only briefly and intermittently by my head and its dreadful thoughts of returning to the future.1
By the time I actually did have to go back to my job and computer, doing so felt altogether alien. The firehose of information, most of it useless but for entertainment or sport; the pace of life, most of it racing to no end; the basic mechanics of limiting my body and mind to the tasks on the impressive machine in front of me, most of them eternal and self-replicating. There are many modern worlds we could have landed on. Yet something drove us to create this one, where we chase a happiness that we hope will last, even as we know that it will not, via the manmade powers that turn us into dejected slaves.
It can be hard to not get hung up on that. For some of us, it’s the “default setting” that David Foster Wallace spoke of in his 2005 commencement speech. It’s been shared to death already in the nearly two decades since it was delivered, I know. But I return to it often, and each return, along with each subtle shift in context, leads me to something new. Such is the power of ritual. So it’s back in the water I will now go.
DFW tells the graduating class:
I submit that this is what the real, no-bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in, day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.
However:
If you really learn how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down. Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it. This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.
The gloom I sometimes feel about our modern world is just that: a gloom I sometimes feel. It is not a sense of impending doom any more than it’s a sense of cheerful optimism. I don’t possess much of either of those. What I’ve got, among many other feelings, is this subtle sense of gloom, of dissatisfaction, and sometimes also of shame for feeling the way that I do. My guess is that I would probably feel this way in any modern world, though. It’s just who I am. And for whatever bleakness the gloom brings, it’s also my primary source of light. What would music be, for example, without a sense of gloom? How would we open ourselves to it? How would it do its essential reparative work? What would life be if we were all bouncing around full of cheerful optimism, listening to Blackpink and endlessly polluting the world with our sins of cute emojis?
And besides, some other modern world might not allow me what this one does. I.e., options. I like those. But I also think there might be too many of them and not enough of them all at once. And I think that might be why some of the directions I now see us moving in deflate me as much as they do. Maybe what I see are the nutritive options already gone and the ones that remain being slowly whittled down into bland copies of what once was. There are still, for now, ways to escape the things in life that I feel trapped by, ways to arrive at new things in life that I feel enriched by. If only I could see through the smoke of modernity, and through the loud lights of all its screens and devices, enough to find my way from the road of what is to the road of what I think ought to be. And if only it wasn’t modernity itself that seemed to stand in the way of that so much of the time. I'm far from alone in that feeling, I know. But for me and all who feel the same, would finding the road to what we think ought to be actually change anything? Or would we still just be who we are, still just view the world through the prism of all that ails and excites us, all that soothes and comforts us, all that challenges and strengthens us, all that inevitably leaves us dissatisfied and seeking something less, or something more, or more likely, both?
There are, of course, many others out there who think that modern life is objectively awesome, and that we moderns have it better than ever, and that to see it otherwise, or even question the premise at any length or with any seriousness, is to be delusional, or uninformed, or ungrateful, or overthinking it, or all of the above. After all, just look at all the charts we’ve made! Have you not seen the lines and bars and maps and timelines that document our rise? To cure your delusions and ingratitude, to cure your very self, simply feast your eyes on all our clear measures of progress. See this line over here, and how it increases? And this one over here, and how it decreases? See our power? See how we’ve become gods? See how we’re becoming even godlier gods? Feel better? Feel cured?
Needless to say, perhaps, I encounter a lot of this working as I do within “the progress community.” And to all of it, I say fair enough. There are times when I see and feel it, too. Humans are impressive and have done impressive things. One thing among many that has made me see and feel humanity’s progress less, though, is my daily exposure to the things telling me that I should only see and feel it, and that I should also only see and feel it in certain ways, ways that fit particular progress narratives but don’t align with what I actually think, ways for example, that seem to envision us—somehow—turning our world into a fully sterilized, digitized, sustainable, automated, wealthy, ever-growing, disparity-less and genderless techno-utopia, one in which peace and power and equality reign in unison and humans live long and healthy lives full of abundance and their externally-sourced happiness lasts forever.
I’m obviously exaggerating somewhat here, but I mean, by how much?
So, there are times when I see and feel our progress, and then there are times when I don’t. There are also times when I simultaneously do and do not see and feel it. There are a lot of them, actually, and it’s not at all clear to me that any one version of the stories is correct while another is incorrect. They all coexist in the same reality, which is full of near-infinite contradictions and complexities and uncertainties, and that can be said about just the view of the story from my tiny reality, never mind the eight billion parallel others out there, living their lives as strangely animated specks, husks of the complex creatures we use to make our charts.
But I would also say that those who think that modernity is clearly where it’s at, and who embrace and cheer our forward motion into more of the same, only faster and better, are no different than me. They may be more satisfied with where we are than I am, but they are still dissatisfied enough to keep looking for the road to what they think ought to be, which appears to them exactly as it does to the rest of us, through their own personal prisms of wanting something less or more or both.
To be clear, I’m not trying to prove or disprove anything about modernity here. I’m not trying to make anyone who feels awesome—or awful, for that matter—about it or the future feel worse about either. I’m merely trying to map and mine the space between our collective stories and the ones in my mind. Because there are a lot of discrepancies and incoherences therein. And I consider it my job as (1) an existential explorer and (2) the lone caretaker of my mind to see if I can resolve some of them. So I hereby claim this terrain as mine.
2.
There is maybe one thing that I’m trying to prove, though. So if I’m to be accused of doing that, then let that thing be this: There is great beauty and insight to be found in open contemplation, simply observing and thinking long and hard on the complexities that move and morph between us, but that also get lost and misconstrued outside us, free from the limits of immovable narratives and conclusions. We can call it a surrender to the contemplative life, or an embrace of a wonder without end. As I’m sure you’ve heard from Walt Whitman or just noticed about us humans by now, we are large, and we contain multitudes. We are not clean or clear or easy to read. We are not statistics. We are astounding containers of messy multitudes who, unbeknownst to us much of the time, habitually chase what we lack (or once did) and can’t keep.2 Hence those often-incompatible prisms we see the world through.
We are not doomed to choose between lives in pursuit of progress or ones in avoidance of doom. Nor are our progressions and regressions necessarily signs of our lives getting better or worse. They are signs only of change. And all change comes with benefits and costs, which humans absorb like sunlight—a source of both vitamin D and cancer—and process into opinions. Some of those opinions might even be right. But most of them will probably be wrong. (And a few of them are bound to be cancerous.) When all is said and done, though, the sun will still be there, rising and setting, and delivering its nutrition and destruction in one fell swoop.
At the heart of all wonder are questions, examinations, ontological investigations. No thoughts or ideas are off limits. The more obvious, automatic, and self-evident they seem, the more ruthless our interrogations should be.
Not that questioning the obvious is a guarantee of passage to better things. It is not. It is at least as likely to lead to cynicism and nihilism and contempt and their ilk as it is to lead to optimism and gratitude and empathy and theirs. But are there other options available to those of us who’ve acquired a taste for wearing our deep-thinking caps? I don’t think there are. And besides, cynicism, nihilism, contempt, and so on are on the menu either way. So the challenge (questioning the obvious without getting lost in a vast inner darkness), while hard, is one that I think we’d be wise to face and learn to overcome. Because where do we go absent such questions? Where do we turn? Where is our true north? Where even are we?
This is another crucial aspect of the mammoth message that envelops all of the others in DFW’s commencement speech.
Right out of the gate, he tells us the tale of why his then-forthcoming speech will be so moving to so many that it will later be commodified as a book under the title This Is Water:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
In other words:
The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance […] If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.
Now, there are probably some readers who will object to my bringing DFW’s speech into this essay (again), as some of its other core messages are ones of awareness and selflessness and care and sacrifice and empathy, and what is the pursuit of human progress but an attempt at achieving the same? I can agree enough with that claim to leave it alone. But I’m not challenging that attempt. What I’m challenging is the notion of progress itself. What is it? Is it happening now? Is it as self-evident as it seems? Is it the pursuit of human power? Is it a kind of human worship? Is it turning us into happy gods? Is it turning us into miserable ones? Is it our default setting? Is it an attempt at achieving greater awareness and selflessness and care and sacrifice and empathy? Is it the only road to achieving those things? Is it the right road at all? What if we value and seek different things? What if, say, billions of different people with billions of different opinions and beliefs somehow don’t agree on slippery concepts like what constitutes “better” or “worse” lives? What if better and worse come packaged together, like vitamin D and cancer in a 4.5 billion-year-old star?
What would the majority of people choose from the following list as their preferred form of progress?:
more contentment
more meaning
more money
less work
more lifespan per human
more resources per human
fewer humans
greater economic growth
less infectious disease
less chronic disease
more energy
less environmental degradation
more rights
more regulations
more individualism
more collectivism
greater freedoms
stronger communities
decreased suffering
increased rewards
less adversity
more personal growth
less discrimination
more positive discrimination
more consensus
more freedom of thought
half of the above at the cost of the other half
Can sunlight reach us without bringing cancer? Can light form without making a shadow? What the hell is water? Is it a part of God? Is it only a part of nature? Is nature a part of God? Is God a part of nature? Is nature nothing? Is God nothing? Is everything nothing? Is nothing everything? Are we everything? Are we nothing?
DFW goes on:
Here’s another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’” And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and they showed me the way back to camp.”
It’s easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy’s interpretation is true and the other guy’s is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from inside the two guys. As if a person’s most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hardwired, like height or shoe size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there’s the matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogantly certain of their own interpretations, too. They’re probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists’ problem is exactly the same as the story’s unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.
The point here is that I think this is one part of what “teaching me how to think” is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. […]
What strikes me about the above, in the context of this essay, is that you’d be hard-pressed to find many who disagree with it, at least in principle. Progress proponents, doomsayers, Christians, atheists, conservatives, liberals—all would probably be quick to praise open-mindedness and denounce blind certainty. All would also probably be quick to praise “personal, intentional choice” in constructing meaning and to denounce any restrictions of it placed on them. But at the center of those praises and denouncements, I think, is less of a quest or challenge set for oneself and more of a request or demand made of others: open your mind to me, escape your imprisonment for me, turn off your blind certainty for me, affirm the truth of my ideas, respect my choices, confirm my biases, give validity to my opinions, give rise to me.
That said, I think most of us do actually aim to offer the same open-mindedness to others. We certainly want to be seen as someone who does, anyway. Because we see the value in it. So it’s not as though we’ve chosen to skirt our half of this quest entirely. However, I think many are willing to do so as soon as it’s their particular ideology or identity that is on the line.
That’s why so many of our debates—including those between progress proponents and doomsayers—end up looking like forever wars in which both sides dig their heels into their own certainty and already-reached conclusions, while working primarily to prove the other side and its certainties and already-reached conclusions wrong, rather than working primarily to stay open to new discoveries. Oddly enough, not everyone is itching to admit that their identity might be built atop a flawed foundation that now needs to be uprooted and rebuilt from scratch. So the heels all dig in deeper.
The overall truth and the utility in DFW’s speech is far more self-evident to me than anything found in the certitude of our many unyielding ideologies, and the messages therein only gain strength under my scrutiny. And yet, many of us still choose to sacrifice our uncertainty regularly, in defense of our chosen beliefs and dogmas, and in worship of our ideas and selves.
DFW continues:
[…] Here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings.
They are the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along on the fuel of fear and anger and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, 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.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
Here I will only say hallelujah and ask again: What is progress? Is it happening now? Is it as self-evident as it seems? Is it the pursuit of human power? Is it a kind of human worship? Is it turning us into happy gods? Is it turning us into miserable ones? Is it our default setting? Is it an attempt at achieving greater awareness and selflessness and care and sacrifice and empathy? Is it the only road to achieving those things? Is it the right road at all?
Are there others? Ones in which we citizens of the human state are not always off somewhere else, chasing endless satiation while eating our own tails?
3.
Here’s another didactic little story: In the early 20th century, humans developed a potion for blocking cancer-causing ultraviolet rays from the sun without sacrificing vitamin D absorption. The progress proponents shouted hooray. The doomsayers waited a beat, then pointed to the increase in UV radiation due to human-caused depletion of the ozone layer. The progress proponents pointed to the ozone layer’s remarkable (albeit partial) recovery. The doomsayers pointed to the ozone layer’s partial (albeit remarkable) recovery. The unnamed, apparition-like “experts” estimated the ozone layer’s return to pre-1980 levels by 2040. The progress proponents shouted hooray. The doomsayers pointed out that it was also at pre-1980 levels before 1980. In a forest somewhere, a philosopher cried.
Here’s one more didactic little story, this one from the first entry in E.B. White’s One Man’s Meat, a short essay titled “Removal” and dated July 1938:
Lately I haven’t had time to read the papers, as I have been building a mouseproof closet against a rain of mice. But sometimes, kindling a fire with last week’s Gazette, I glance through the pages and catch up a little with the times. […]
The news of television, however, is what I particularly go for when I get a chance at the paper, for I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television—of that I am quite sure.
[…]
Clearly the race today is between loud speaking and soft, between the things that are and the things that seem to be, between the chemist of RCA and the angel of God. Radio has already given sound a wide currency, and sound “effects” are taking the place once enjoyed by sound itself. Television will enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote. More hours in every twenty-four will be spent digesting ideas, sounds, images—distant and concocted. In sufficient accumulation, radio sounds and television sights may become more familiar to us than their originals. A door closing, heard over the air; a face contorted, seen in a panel of light—these will emerge as the real and the true; and when we bang the door of our own cell or look into another’s face the impression will be of mere artifice. […]
When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad.
We can read this as proof of a past moral panic that turned out to be nothing. Or we can see it as a prescient vision of our current trajectory, an early read on the consequences of our relentless onward march. Or we can see it as an inseparable mix of all of this, and wonder if our appetites for salvation and destruction are, in fact, one and the same. The choice is personal, intentional, and ours.
Everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.
—David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately—the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose? This was why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions why and to what grow real beaks and claws. It was kind, in a way.
—David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest