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

by David Foster Wallace

Actually I have never seen an average American household. Except on TV.

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

For 360 minutes per diem, we receive unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant quality of truly alive persons is watchableness, and that genuine human worth is not just identical with but rooted in the phenomenon of watching.

Six hours a day is more time than most people (consciously) do any other one thing. How human beings who absorb such high doses understand themselves will naturally change, become vastly more spectatorial, self-conscious. Because the practice of “watching” is expansive. Exponential. We spend enough time watching, pretty soon we start watching ourselves watching. Pretty soon we start to “feel” ourselves feeling, yearn to experience “experiences.”

Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

U.S. pop culture is just like U.S. serious culture in that its central tension has always set the nobility of individualism against the warmth of communal belonging.

That is, television’s real pitch in these commercials is that it’s better to be inside the TV than to be outside, watching.

art was supposed to work, a transition from art’s being a creative instantiation of real values to art’s being a creative rejection of bogus values.

“Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.”

I think the world divides neatly into those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and those who are not.

the difference between a writer—the person whose choices and actions account for a text’s features—and an author—the entity whose intentions are taken to be responsible for a text’s meaning.

An academic definition of Lynchian might be that the term “refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.”

a warm and full-hearted interest, sort of the way you look when you’re watching somebody you love doing something you also love.

I am now 33 years old, 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.

after a while you begin to intuit that the host isn’t acting out of regard or affection for you so much as simply going around obeying the imperatives of some personal neurosis having to do with domestic cleanliness and order… which means that, since the ultimate point and object of the cleaning isn’t you but rather cleanliness and order, it’s going to be a relief for her when you leave. Meaning her hygienic pampering of you is actually evidence that she doesn’t want you around.