The Prophecy of David Foster Wallace

Exploring Wallace’s prescient take on media, loneliness, and the age of overstimulation

Every time I come across a quote from David Foster Wallace or a clip from one of his angst-riddled interviews, I spiral into a binge of consuming his writing. What makes him so contagious for me isn’t just his humor, wit, or his audacity to write a 1,000+ page novel like Infinite Jest. No. It’s how extraordinarily prescient his words remain.

Primarily writing throughout the ’90s and early ’00s, he recognized that culture stood on the precipice of something catastrophic, and he couldn’t look away from his disquieting vision of the future. FaceTime, beauty filters, an endless stream of highly-stimulating, pleasurable content—he foresaw it all and explored these dystopian themes in Infinite Jest. Pointless productivity, inescapable boredom, and a life devoid of even a modicum of meaning are central to his posthumously published novel, The Pale King. In both his fiction and nonfiction, an ominous undertone pervades his writing, as if he sensed that society was carelessly spiraling downhill and that he knew he’d eventually take the exit ramp.

Anticipating The Storm

Wallace’s clairvoyance was both his gift and a contributing factor to his fateful end. Battling substance abuse and depression for most of his adult life, he understood firsthand the spiderweb-like grip of addiction, as described in the AA meetings in Infinite Jest. The tail end of his life saw the emergence of widespread free internet porn, odious cynicism and blatant corruption in politics, sleazy marketing, and early iterations of virtual reality. Surrounded by ego-centered cultural trends and rapid technological advancement, Wallace couldn’t help but foresee the psychological toll this would take on humanity—namely, how lonely and disconnected people would become.

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.” - David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

All of the side effects of his society have become mainstays and defining features of our own. Jokes are made sarcastically, advertisements mock themselves, digital identities carry more weight than physical ones, podcasts pose as honest, real conversations, and paranoia sits at the root of news consumption. Nothing feels real. Sincerity is a devalued. Everything is affectation. Worse still, our isolation and insatiable thirst for pleasure have been exacerbated by social media.

One of Wallace’s greatest fears that he consistently echoes in interviews is that people are grossing increasingly addicted to entertainment and decreasingly comfortable with themselves. Our ability to sit alone or commit our attention to a singular activity for an extended period of time has utterly dissipated. He explains in an interview with David Lipsky: “…as the Internet grows, and as our ability to be linked up…at a certain point, we're gonna have to build some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it's gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that's the basic main staple of your diet, you're gonna die. In a meaningful way, you're going to die.”

Simply put, our society has become more and more decadent and proportionately less and less happy. We have infinite pleasure at our fingertips in frightening ways even Wallace never imagined, yet depression and suicide rates continue to rise. There’s a cognitive dissonance in various aspects of our culture that continues to be ignored both by consumers and by greedy tech conglomerates who have no problem ravaging lives for profit.

The Cage of Irony

One feature of Wallace’s writing that grips me is his unmistakable sincerity, one you can tell he painstakingly toils over in a never-ending loop of self-awareness. Readers can sense the paralyzing fear he’s trapped in and how he sees society similarly trapped in appearances, perceptions, and affectations. In his interviews, you can visually see the ways in which he strains to present himself honestly and genuinely. Despite the unavoidable intention that he poured into his works, his writing exudes his desperation for sincerity.

He expresses these fears surrounding sincerity most directly in his short story My Appearance, in which a young woman appears on Late Night with David Letterman and is fretfully concerned with appearing genuine despite the paradox of an artificially constructed conversation. He also explores it in my favorite essay of his, E Unibus Pluram, where he examines the portentous connection between television, advertising, and loneliness. In that essay, he adds that: “Irony is the song of a bird who has come to love its cage,” suggesting we’ve become so aware of our external perception that we shield ourselves through irony and sarcasm to avoid public judgement.

In Wallace’s mind, genuine expression has become a thing of the past in the emerging world of reality TV, late night talk shows, and ostensibly honest brokers. One can only imagine what Wallace would say about today’s influencers, podcasters, and unctuous politicians.

Seeking Answers

Unfortunately, like many prophecies, Wallace’s genius was limited to articulating the problems, while leaving the solutions open to interpretation. His unfinished novel The Pale King likely offers the closest thing to an answer: “To be, in a word, unborable.... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”

Personally, I find his 2005 commencement speech, known as This is Water, to offer his most optimistic and practical advice: a simple suggestion that we be more aware. Sounds simple enough, right? Like Camus, he believed that we have the ability to choose what to pay attention to and what to infuse with meaning. It’s a matter of choice and awareness. It may not be satisfying or easy—and it unfortunately didn’t save his life—but greater awareness and sincerity can only benefit our society.

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Interviews with David Foster Wallace worth watching: