David Foster Wallace noticed it in a lot of his friends: “Something that doesn’t have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It’s more like stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness.” Beneath the psychological manifestations, Wallace noticed that the fundamental cause was moral directionlessness. “This is a generation that has an inheritance of absolutely nothing as far as meaningful moral values.”
