Qualy #38 - Finding meaning in struggle and why we are less happy than ever (David Foster Wallace)
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
194.83405
Summary
If you could bring anybody back from the dead, of recent era, who would it be? Who would you want to bring back? And who would you choose to replace them with? David Foster Wallace.
Transcript
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subscribe so without further delay i hope you enjoy today's quali you know you said something a moment
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ago that made me think of one of my favorite talks so you know you and i you know that i'm the biggest
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fan of david foster wallace this person who i've just i've just always been kind of so amazed by
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his insight i just you know here's a guy who was not a trained psychiatrist he's a writer and yet
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his insights into humanity go beyond almost anything i think you couldn't learn this stuff
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in a textbook and um you know i've been asked before like if you could bring anybody back from
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the dead you know of recent era right who would it be and i think it would be him you know if i could
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if i could go back in time and spend a day with anybody it would probably be with david foster
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wallace he has a very famous commencement speech from 2005 that he delivered at kenyon college
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titled this is water and in it he talks about the fact that we're i think he the way he describes it is
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there's no such thing as atheism we are all worshiping some god do you worship money power your body
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you know your physical allure and he almost makes the case that at least if you pick a god to worship
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the harm to you might be less because if it is money you worship you'll never have enough if it's
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power you worship you'll never feel strong enough if it's intellect that you worship you'll always feel
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like a fraud and i remember listening to this for the very first time which was many years ago and
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thinking yeah i get that like i really get that like i i i i know i'm not alone but i think a lot
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of people who place their self-worth in their intellect you think what if people find out i'm
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not that smart like i'm just a fraud and you know it's again it's just it just speaks to this entire
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nature of humanity and of course the tragedy in the case of david foster wallace is that he ends up
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taking his own life by suicide three years after he gave that talk now totally unrelated i want to
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play something for you so i was actually just listening to this today i'd know i hadn't come
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across this before but this is an interview with david foster wallace and terry gross from npr
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i believe it was 97 so it was like a year or two after infinite jest came out so i want to play this for
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you if i can cue it up on my phone here because i thought of you as soon as i heard this right okay here
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we go you know i really like the way you talk you write about a pleasure and how um difficult it can
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be to to really achieve um you write about pleasure in the infinite jest your your your latest novel
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and i'm thinking you know one of the things relating to that in infinite jest uh one of the
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characters finds that that marijuana is marijuana is no longer a pleasurable experience it just makes
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them terribly self-conscious and therefore anxious and i'm wondering what happens to you when you do
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something that's supposed to give you pleasure and that just makes you uncomfortable or anxious
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boy i'm not really even sure how to respond to that look a lot of the impetus for writing
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infinite jest was just the fact that that i was about 30 and i had a lot of friends who were about 30 and
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we'd all you know been grotesquely over educated and privileged our whole lives and
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had better health care and more money than our parents did and we were all extraordinarily sad
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i think it has something to do with with being raised in an era when really um the ultimate value
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seems to be i mean a successful life is let's see you make a lot of money um and you have a really
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attractive spouse uh or you get um you get infamous or famous in some way so that it's a life where you
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basically experience as much pleasure as possible which ends up which ends up being sort of empty
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and low calorie but the reason i don't like talking about it discursively is it sounds very banal and
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cliche you know when you say it out loud that way believe it or not this was this came as something of
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an epiphany to us at around age 30 sitting around talking about why on earth we were so miserable when
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we've been so lucky well when did you realize that uh all the all the benefits you had in an educated
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middle class life weren't bringing you happiness well i look i guess it i guess it sort of depends
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on what what you mean by happiness i mean it's not like we were walking around fingering razor blades
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or anything like that but it just sort of seems as if we we sort of knew how happy our parents were
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and we would compare our lives with our parents and see that at least on the surface or according to
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the criteria that the culture lays down for a successful happy life we were actually doing better than a lot
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of them were and so why on earth were we so miserable i i don't think i you know i i don't
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mean to suggest that that it was you know a state of constant clinical depression or that we all felt
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that we were supposed to be blissfully happy all the time there was just um i have a very weird and
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amateur sense that that an enormous part of like my generation and the generation right after mine is
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just an extremely sad sort of lost generation which when you think about the material comforts and the
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political freedoms that we enjoy is just strange i could listen to interviews with david well
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indefinitely but it's interesting that i came across that today for the first time again i don't know
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how i missed it wow today today just just literally today i hope you enjoyed today's quali now sit tight
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