Cause the technology is just gonna get better and better and it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable to sit alone with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money and that’s fine in low doses but if it’s the basic main staple of your diet you’re gonna die.

– David Foster Wallace

I suspect my being an adult father of three kids played a role, as I was nodding all the time, often feeling emotional about it. Anyway, here’s the YouTube recording I’m talking about, and here’s a transcription I dug out of the Internet Archive.

Spoiler warning, I’m now going to quote Wikipedia, where I found a good summarization of the themes covered:

The speech covers subjects including the difficulty of empathy, the unimportance of being well-adjusted, and the apparent lonesomeness of adult life. It suggests that higher education’s overall purpose is to consciously choose how to perceive others, think about meaning, and act appropriately in everyday life. Wallace argues that the true freedom acquired through education is the ability to be fully conscious and sympathetic. Authors Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb have said that Wallace used the speech to outline his spiritual philosophy and the methods he used to find peace when wrestling with anxiety and depression.

I also learned on Wikipedia that the speech’s themes were expanded in Wallace’s novel The Pale King, posthumously published in 2011. With all its intimidating size, the Pale King has been sitting on my nightstand (aka reading list) for ages. Maybe it’s time to deal with it.

Because here’s something else that’s 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 an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship-be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible 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, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power-you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart-you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

–David Foster Wallace in “This is Water” (via)

I know of nobody else who writes as thoughtfully and intelligently as DFW. That he manages to write so informatively, with humor and genuine wit, on almost any subject under the sun is mind-blowing – it’s also why I am willing to forgive his occasional stylistic excesses. (Can you spell ‘footnote’?) You may not have a strong interest in lobsters or pornography, but the essays in question are terrific. The reporting on Ziegler and McCain is outstanding, heartbreakingly so, because it makes the relative shallowness of most reporting painfully evident.

Yes, I know all about his weaknesses - the digressions, the rampant footnote abuse, the flaunting of his extraordinary erudition. I know all this, and I don’t care. Because when he is in top form, there’s nobody else I would instead read. The man is hilarious; I think he’s a mensch, and I don’t believe he parades his erudition to prove how smart he is. I think he can’t help himself - it’s a consequence of his wide-ranging curiosity. At heart, he’s a geek but a charming, hyper-articulate geek. Who is almost frighteningly bright.

If you have never read DFW, my advice would be to start with his non-fiction, which is way more accessible than his fiction (with the notable exception of The Brook of the System, which was my first adored DFW reading.)