Life Sucks When You’re Not Winning
David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest, recently killed himself at the age of 46 (an age I will reach in just four years). His passing has brought attention to his Kenyon College commencement speech from three years ago in which, it has been noted by his fans, he briefly mentioned suicide.
I’ve read this speech from start to finish, and I think the whole thing is about suicide. It’s practically his suicide note.
Much of the speech was spent revealing, in exquisite detail, how most of your life is ruined by not being rich. You have to drive at the worst times. You have to shop at the worst times. You have to spend a lot of time working with, shopping with — just plain being around — hordes of people whose unexceptional charisma and shell-shocked, what-happened-to-my-dreams demeanor make you wish you were somewhere else. In other words, you have to be around people like yourself — who comprise most of the population.
Wallace scarcely (never?) mentioned wealth in his speech. He talked as if every adult must live on average-to-somewhat-above-average means. And he was careful to say that detesting your condition (of being non-rich) is not the way you’re supposed to think — at a point when the audience of Kenyon grads was cheering his descriptions of thinking that way — but why you’re not supposed to, he didn’t say. He just dogmatically repeated that you’re already dead if you do think that way. Or you’re not adult. Or you’re unconscious. Or all of the above.
He described the Hummer, with its huge gas tank, cruising next to you on the freeway, as “selfish,” but fails to consider that the person driving it probably is rich enough to pay for all that extra gas out of his own pocket. Instead he conjures up the far less likely hypothetical that the Hummer’s driver has been in a scary accident and is now petrified to drive something smaller than a Hummer. Uh-huh. Or maybe the driver is actually just as bad off as you are, maybe even worse, but just happens to be revealing one of the few non-sucky parts of his life (his Hummer) to you at this moment. Or — maybe not.
My personal opinion is that the only way to deal with not being rich is to set some specific goals that you want to achieve while you’re still in this world and can influence it. Not phony goals invented just for the purpose of dealing with your condition — real ones, ones that you really would like to see effected. Being non-rich, while certainly a miserable way to live, is not the same as being powerless or ineffectual.
I think David Foster Wallace killed himself because he didn’t have, or ran out of, such goals.
Self, Selfishness, and the Unavoidable Game
In a large way, Wallace’s speech is about the meaning of self and selfishness in the human condition. He pretty directly states that being focused on wanting your own, individual condition to be better, is a failure to grow up, or perhaps even a failure to be really alive. The right way (or grown-up way, or alive way, or conscious way, or “liberal arts” way as he also calls it) to think, is of the big picture and what will make things better for everyone.
But is there such a thing? Is it even possible to think that way? You can’t predict the long-term effects of your actions, so all you can really do to attempt to provide for the big picture is to randomly cede the way to others, not really knowing what they’re doing with the privilege, and assume that this helps humanity as a whole. What if it helps just a few randomly selected, primarily selfish individuals to get more of the things they selfishly want? And what if Wallace recently started to realize that?
Wallace seemed genuinely disturbed by the true nature of our world: We each have been placed in a single body, and sequentially experience just the things that happen to that one body. Selfishness is pretty much guaranteed to be the motivator of each individual, even those that try desperately to escape such selfishness (or perhaps the appearance of it?) as did Wallace.
To me the evidence is overwhelming, in the extreme, that this world is a competitive, arena-like existence in which the point is to try your best to jockey for position — not just for money (though mainly so) but also for fame, recognition, social standing, admiration, etc. You can accept that reality, and enjoy playing the game to the best of your ability. Or you can spend tremendous mental energy confusedly trying to convince yourself (and/or others) that you have somehow risen “above” the game, as did Wallace.
Or, if you don’t want to play the game (and/or aren’t winning it to a modicum of satisfaction), and have realized that there really isn’t any way to rise above it while staying in it too — then you can simply bow out.
As did Wallace.
© 2010 Darel Rex Finley | design by