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Are You Not Entertained?
It’s possible, both as an individual and as a society, to be too entertained.
This is a Mindf*ck Monthly newsletter from July 18, 2022. Every month, I send out big ideas I’ve been chewing on in the hopes that it makes you less of a shitty person.
Let’s dive right in.
In David Foster Wallace’s classic novel, Infinite Jest, there’s a movie that is so entertaining that anyone who views even a small portion of it will give up all desire to do anything else in life in order to keep watching. Throughout the book, characters who see it give up family, friends, careers, even eating and sleeping, just to continue watching the film.
The overarching theme of Infinite Jest is that it’s possible, both as an individual and as a society, to be too entertained. And much of the book’s 1000+ pages are about the absurdity of such a society. Wallace wrote Infinite Jest in the early 1990s, a time when televisions were just starting to get dozens of channels, news was being broadcast 24 hours per day, video games were taking over the minds of young kids, and blockbuster movies were earning unheard of amounts of cash at the box office each summer.
At the time, Wallace had just gone through a recovery program for alcohol and drug abuse. Yet, despite getting clean for the…
