A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

by David Foster Wallace

From planes, it always looks to me like Monopoly or Life, or a lab maze for rats;

I began, very quietly, to resent my physical place in the great schema, and this resentment and bitterness, a kind of slow root-rot,

I happen to believe this is why television also appeals so much to lonely people.

Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans.

They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.

by 1830, de Tocqueville had already diagnosed American culture as peculiarly devoted to easy sensation and mass-marketed entertainment,

Television’s greatest minute-by-minute appeal is that it engages without demanding. One can rest while undergoing stimulation. Receive without giving. In this respect, television resembles certain other things one might call Special Treats (e.g. candy, liquor), i.e. treats that are basically fine and fun in small amounts but bad for us in large amounts and really bad for us if consumed in the massive regular amounts reserved for nutritive staples. One can only guess at what volume of gin or poundage of Toblerone six hours of Special Treat a day would convert to.

Americans are lonely, and if it’s true that many lonely people are prodigious TV-watchers, and it’s true that lonely people find in television’s 2-D images relief from their stressful reluctance to be around real human beings, then it’s also obvious that the more time spent at home alone watching TV, the less time spent in the world of real human beings, and that the less time spent in the real human world, the harder it becomes not to feel inadequate to the tasks involved in being a part of the world, thus fundamentally apart from it, alienated from it, solipsistic, lonely.

quiet his conscience while he goes about getting from television what we’ve all been trained to want from it: some strangely American, profoundly shallow, and eternally temporary reassurance.

Americans seemed no longer united so much by common beliefs as by common images: what binds us became what we stand witness to.

“We’re not here to capture an image. We’re here to maintain one. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.”

It’s not paranoid or hysterical to acknowledge that television in enormous doses affects people’s values and self-perception in deep ways. Nor that televisual conditioning influences the whole psychology of one’s relation to himself, his mirror, his loved ones, and a world of real people and real gazes.

using primal, flim-flam appeals to sell sugary crud to people whose identity is nothing but mass consumption.

For if anarchy actually wins, if rulelessness become the rule, then protest and change become not just impossible but incoherent. It’d be like casting a ballot for Stalin: you are voting for an end to all voting.

our televisual culture has become a cynical, narcissistic, essentially empty phenomenon, when television regularly celebrates just these features in itself and its viewers?

Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.

We will, in short, be able to engineer our own dreams.

render me ever more dependent on the device that affords escape from just what my escapism makes unpleasant.

Make no mistake: we are dependent on image-technology; and the better the tech, the harder we’re hooked.

grew up in rural Illinois but haven’t been back for a long time and can’t say I’ve missed it—the yeasty heat, the lush desolation of limitless corn, the flatness. But it’s like bike-riding, in a way. The native body readjusts automatically to the flatness, and as your calibration gets finer, driving, you can start to notice that the dead-level flatness is only apparent. There are unevennesses, ups and downs, slight but rhythmic. Straight-shot I-55 will start, ever so slightly, to rise, maybe 5° over a mile, then go just as gentle back down,

By the time I left for college the area no longer seemed dull so much as empty, lonely. Middle-of-the-ocean lonely. You can go weeks without seeing a neighbor. It gets to you.

Older ladies in the Midwest can bake.

One of the few things I still miss from my Midwest childhood was this weird, deluded but unshakable conviction that everything around me existed all and only For Me. Am I the only one who had this queer deep sense as a kid?—that everything exterior to me existed only insofar as it affected me somehow?—that all things were somehow, via some occult adult activity, specially arranged for my benefit? Does anybody else identify with this memory?

(Rural Illinois’ complete lack of ethnic identity creates a kind of postmodern embarrassment of riches—foods of every culture and creed become our own, quick-fried and served on cardboard and consumed on foot.)

I am not spiritually Midwestern anymore,

and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable—if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.