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

by David Foster Wallace

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.

Existentiovoyeuristic conundra notwithstanding,

When everybody we seek to identify with for six hours a day is pretty, it naturally becomes more important to us to be pretty, to be viewed as pretty. Because prettiness becomes a priority for us, the pretty people on TV become all the more attractive, a cycle which is obviously great for TV. But it’s less great for us civilians, who tend to own mirrors, and who also tend not to be anywhere near as pretty as the TV-images we want to identify with.

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.

For, as with television, whether we happen personally to love technology, hate it, fear it, or all three, we still look relentlessly to technology for solutions to the very problems technology seems to cause—see e.g. catalysis for smog, S.D.I. for nuclear missiles, transplants for assorted rot.

Worse, the VCR, with its dreaded fast-forward and zap functions, threatens the very viability of commercials.

Lol

Given that television must revolve off basic antinomies about being and watching, about escape from daily life, the averagely intelligent viewer can’t be all that happy about his daily life of high-dose watching.

It invites Joe into an in-joke the Audience is the butt of. It congratulates Joe Briefcase, in other words, on transcending the very crowd that defines him.

For irony—exploiting gaps between what’s said and what’s meant, between how things try to appear and how they really are—is the time-honored way artists seek to illuminate and explode hypocrisy.

irony tyrannizes us.

Kmart People.

Men after a certain age simply should not wear shorts, I’ve decided; their legs are hairless in a way that’s creepy; the skin seems denuded and practically crying out for hair, particularly on the calves. It’s just about the only body-area where you actually want more hair on older men. Is this fibular hairlessness a result of years of chafing in pants and socks?

Captain Nico explains that the Nadir subscribes to something called GPS: