The Peter Attia Drive - October 09, 2019


Qualy #38 - Finding meaning in struggle and why we are less happy than ever (David Foster Wallace)


Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

194.83405

Word count

1,403

Sentence count

3

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 welcome to the qualies a subscriber exclusive podcast qualies is just a shorthand slang for
00:00:10.640 a qualification round which is something you do prior to the race just a little bit quicker
00:00:14.880 qualies podcast features episodes that are short and we're hoping for less than 10 minutes each
00:00:19.920 which highlight the best questions topics tactics etc discussed on previous episodes of the drive
00:00:26.100 we recognize many of you as new listeners to the podcast may not have the time to go back and
00:00:30.920 listen to every episode and those of you who have already listened may have forgotten so the new
00:00:35.000 episodes of the qualies are going to be released tuesday through friday and they're going to be
00:00:39.000 published exclusively on our private subscriber only podcast feed now occasionally we're going
00:00:43.580 to release quali episodes in the main feed which is what you're about to hear now if you enjoy these
00:00:49.100 episodes and if you're interested in hearing more as well as receiving all of the other subscriber
00:00:53.260 exclusive content which is growing by the month you can visit us at peteratiamd.com forward slash
00:00:59.240 subscribe so without further delay i hope you enjoy today's quali you know you said something a moment
00:01:06.400 ago that made me think of one of my favorite talks so you know you and i you know that i'm the biggest
00:01:10.640 fan of david foster wallace this person who i've just i've just always been kind of so amazed by
00:01:17.300 his insight i just you know here's a guy who was not a trained psychiatrist he's a writer and yet
00:01:24.900 his insights into humanity go beyond almost anything i think you couldn't learn this stuff
00:01:30.020 in a textbook and um you know i've been asked before like if you could bring anybody back from
00:01:35.240 the dead you know of recent era right who would it be and i think it would be him you know if i could
00:01:40.600 if i could go back in time and spend a day with anybody it would probably be with david foster
00:01:45.160 wallace he has a very famous commencement speech from 2005 that he delivered at kenyon college
00:01:50.840 titled this is water and in it he talks about the fact that we're i think he the way he describes it is
00:01:58.820 there's no such thing as atheism we are all worshiping some god do you worship money power your body
00:02:06.840 you know your physical allure and he almost makes the case that at least if you pick a god to worship
00:02:15.100 the harm to you might be less because if it is money you worship you'll never have enough if it's
00:02:21.700 power you worship you'll never feel strong enough if it's intellect that you worship you'll always feel
00:02:27.860 like a fraud and i remember listening to this for the very first time which was many years ago and
00:02:33.540 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
00:02:41.280 of people who place their self-worth in their intellect you think what if people find out i'm
00:02:46.940 not that smart like i'm just a fraud and you know it's again it's just it just speaks to this entire
00:02:54.560 nature of humanity and of course the tragedy in the case of david foster wallace is that he ends up
00:02:59.220 taking his own life by suicide three years after he gave that talk now totally unrelated i want to
00:03:05.320 play something for you so i was actually just listening to this today i'd know i hadn't come
00:03:09.260 across this before but this is an interview with david foster wallace and terry gross from npr
00:03:13.760 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
00:03:20.700 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
00:03:25.560 we go you know i really like the way you talk you write about a pleasure and how um difficult it can
00:03:32.160 be to to really achieve um you write about pleasure in the infinite jest your your your latest novel
00:03:40.600 and i'm thinking you know one of the things relating to that in infinite jest uh one of the
00:03:46.060 characters finds that that marijuana is marijuana is no longer a pleasurable experience it just makes
00:03:51.020 them terribly self-conscious and therefore anxious and i'm wondering what happens to you when you do
00:03:56.520 something that's supposed to give you pleasure and that just makes you uncomfortable or anxious
00:04:01.220 boy i'm not really even sure how to respond to that look a lot of the impetus for writing
00:04:08.500 infinite jest was just the fact that that i was about 30 and i had a lot of friends who were about 30 and
00:04:13.880 we'd all you know been grotesquely over educated and privileged our whole lives and
00:04:18.700 had better health care and more money than our parents did and we were all extraordinarily sad
00:04:24.860 i think it has something to do with with being raised in an era when really um the ultimate value
00:04:32.460 seems to be i mean a successful life is let's see you make a lot of money um and you have a really
00:04:38.040 attractive spouse uh or you get um you get infamous or famous in some way so that it's a life where you
00:04:45.340 basically experience as much pleasure as possible which ends up which ends up being sort of empty
00:04:51.000 and low calorie but the reason i don't like talking about it discursively is it sounds very banal and
00:04:56.240 cliche you know when you say it out loud that way believe it or not this was this came as something of
00:05:01.220 an epiphany to us at around age 30 sitting around talking about why on earth we were so miserable when
00:05:06.060 we've been so lucky well when did you realize that uh all the all the benefits you had in an educated
00:05:13.340 middle class life weren't bringing you happiness well i look i guess it i guess it sort of depends
00:05:19.440 on what what you mean by happiness i mean it's not like we were walking around fingering razor blades
00:05:24.220 or anything like that but it just sort of seems as if we we sort of knew how happy our parents were
00:05:29.740 and we would compare our lives with our parents and see that at least on the surface or according to
00:05:34.400 the criteria that the culture lays down for a successful happy life we were actually doing better than a lot
00:05:39.220 of them were and so why on earth were we so miserable i i don't think i you know i i don't
00:05:45.040 mean to suggest that that it was you know a state of constant clinical depression or that we all felt
00:05:49.580 that we were supposed to be blissfully happy all the time there was just um i have a very weird and
00:05:55.080 amateur sense that that an enormous part of like my generation and the generation right after mine is
00:06:00.160 just an extremely sad sort of lost generation which when you think about the material comforts and the 0.94
00:06:06.220 political freedoms that we enjoy is just strange i could listen to interviews with david well
00:06:11.620 indefinitely but it's interesting that i came across that today for the first time again i don't know
00:06:16.480 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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