Infinite Jest

Three-sentence Summary

Infinite Jest takes you on a challenging, type-2-fun, mental journey through the lives of a handful key individuals as they reflect on their pasts — mostly tough upbringings — and all-time-lows. Zooming out, a main theme is “addiction”, but really more generally, dedicating our lives to something, either by choice or not — whether it be religion, sports, drugs, or work — and often struggling alone. This isolated dedication numbs us from the difficulties of life; we often latch tighter on to our addictions rather than have difficult conversations and listen and feel for others who are struggling around us.

… there has scarcely been written a more moving account of desperation, depression, addiction, generational stasis and yearning, or the obsession with human expectations, with artistic and athletic and intellectual possibility. [p. xiv]

To be frank, there is so much detail and so many things going on concurrently and in a non-linear way that themes can be drawn both at a micro and macro level. Some themes reappear and span storylines, while others only occur once.

Infinite Jest takes you on a journey through characters’ pasts to experience their deepest and darkest secrets so that you truly understand and empathize with their quirks; something that would never happen in “real life”. David Foster Wallace in many interviews made the comment that certain tough points couldn’t be conveyed in a face-to-face “live” conversation and he felt that these points could be made through written text.

Reading Context

The primary goal of these notes is not to summarize the book, but instead to summarize what I took away — or learned — from the book at this time in my life.

I started this book over Christmas break, 2020, after the first 9-months at a new job, where I spent a lot of that time fighting with Imposter Syndrome, burning myself out and honestly caring too much about what “success” meant for me at the company.

The company is phenomenal at providing means to not burning out, yet I was still caught up with overworking to “prove myself”. I had a Zoom call with a friend, who I had worked with and at the end of our conversation, we migrated to the topic of books and they recommended Infinite Jest. At the time I was looking for something to strengthen my mind — i.e., something that was “hard” — but was not directly related to technology, as in programming, etc.

I can say that this book — and this talk, titled ‘This is Water’ by Infinite Jest’s author, David Foster Wallace which is briefly alluded to in Infinite Jest on p. 445 — have helped me recover from burnout and to approach work and life with a “marathon mindset”.

However, I started this book much like I start many things in my life, sprinting, rather than pacing myself. I kept track of daily page counts for checkpointing and accountability in order to reach my goal of reading the book in under a month. About two weeks in to the book, I asked myself in my reading notes, “Why am I in such a rush to finish?”, “What is next that is so important that I can’t focus on what I am reading now?”. At this point, I stopped tracking progress, “let go” and let myself enjoy this time in my life.

My Takeaways

Genuine Conversations. Listening

The fake ones try so hard to look and feel real. This is how you differentiate a real, real person from someone pretending to be real [p. 734].

We are all struggling with something, but we often put up boundaries to seem “okay” to others, to get external validation in order to convince ourselves that we are okay. This leads to a life consisting primarily of “shallow” conversations.

I read a book titled, Finite and Infinite Games in early 2020 and one of my takeaways from that book was this notion of “theatrical conversations”, where our conversations play out almost as if they were scripted to seem “okay”, rather than to deeply share and help each other.

In Infinite Jest, the only folks who seem to be able to genuinely stop talking and listen and feel for other people are those who are disabled in some way: Mario, Don Gately as he lay in his hospital bed unable to talk as he recovered from surgery to fix a gunshot wound, wraiths (Lyle [p. 387]) of people who have died(?).

Hal didn’t have any(?) deep conversations in the book with people other than himself, but was forced by the “professional conversationalist” to go deep in order to grieve his father’s death [p. 252]. After talking to the professional conversationalist, Hal talked to Lyle — the guru / wraith(?) — where the conclusion was basically in order to deal with grief, you must humble yourself and be willing to fail at all other parts of life at that moment [p. 254].

External Expectations. “Normal”

The true opponent [in the individual, infinite-bounded game of tennis], the enfolding boundary, is the player himself [p. 84].

External expectations often dictate our lives in a pull toward average, complacency and to mirror the majority or the influencer.

Never try to pull a weight that exceeds you [p. 973]

This phrase was used twice in the book and the first time it was used — by Lyle in the weight room — it didn’t carry much meaning. To me at that time, it felt very literal about lifting weights. However, as you zoom out and see this same phrase said in different ways, such as with the folks recovering from addiction and taking it “one moment at a time”, it made more sense. All you can do is improve you, at this moment. Don’t worry about tomorrow or fixing others in order to fix yourself; focus on a weight that you can pull.

Who / What Defines “Normal” or “Insane”

Steeply, the undercover U.S.O.S member posed as a writer for Moment magazine asks Orin, the eldest Incandenza boy, were your father and mother “insane”? How is “insane” defined? Are you only considered “insane” if you cannot function? Can you truly be “insane”, but functioning and therefore also be “normal” [p. 1028 #234]?

Selfish Pleasure. Addiction. “Attachments”. “Freedom” and Choice

Are not all of us fanatics…? [p. 107]

The word “fanatics” comes from the Latin word for “temple”. Literally meaning, “worshipper at the temple”. Marathe — a member of the wheelchair assassins — asks, “Are not all of us fanatics…?” [p. 107] indicating that we should choose our attachments carefully and wisely.

We are all dying to give our lives away to something… [p. 900]

You believe you would die twice for another but in truth would die only for your alone self, its sentiment. [p. 108]

Life’s endless war against the self you cannot live without [p. 84].

“Who teaches your U.S.A. children how to choose their temple? What to love enough not to think two times? …For the choice determines all else. No?” [p. 107] Free choice follows from the ability to know how to choose. But if something is so easy to fall in love with — or we are unable to not fall in love with it — is this free choice?

… choosing is everything … [p. 318]

… now is what has happened when a people choose nothing over themselves to love, each one … A U.S.A. that would die … for the so-called perfect Entertainment … choose to give up everything — even their life — for their own wishes of sentiment. [p. 318]

Then in such a case your temple is self and sentiment. Then in such an instance you are a fanatic of desire, a slave to your individual subjective narrow self’s sentiments; a citizen of nothing. [p. 108]

Admitting powerlessness to the seductive things in life that try to “suck us in” [p. 178].

… commodity as the escape-from-anxieties-of-mortality-when-escape-is-itself-psychologically-fatal … [p. 792]

“Trading one escape for another” [p. 998 #70]

The book highlights individuals’ focus on individual pleasure and love for themselves as individuals over love for community. As individuals, we are “fatally weak”.

Marathe, a member of the Quebec wheelchair assassins asks Steeply, an operative for the United States Office of Unspecified Services, “is the maximized pleasure in the U.S. per the individual or the collective?

Often the belief in the U.S. seems to be that if all individuals’ pleasure is maximized, then the collective pleasure will also be maximized. However, one’s individual pleasure is often at the expense of another’s [p. 424]. Communities working to maximize collective pleasure often include individuals who are willing to make short-term personal sacrifices to satisfy another’s pleasure in order to feel they have a good conscience and with the expectation that another will make the same sacrifice for them when they need it i.e., “delayed gratification” [p. 425]. It’s suggested that the education system fails us in this regard and focuses too much on the individual and doesn’t teach us how to make tough choices in a “free” society [p. 429]. The education system doesn’t teach us how to be free.

In a culture focused on individual pleasure, a one-time free choice may lead to a future where you are no longer free to choose [p. 430]. Even when that future where you are no longer able to freely choose and probably results in premature death — either physically or mentally — is clear when the initial choice is made, people still make the choice for short-term individual pleasure [p. 528]. In society, a majority of the time, short-term individual pleasure seems to trump everything.

Individual pleasure or worth can “look like” trust or charity. For example, Mrs. I. “believing” her children because if she truly thought they were lying, this would indicate that she was a bad parent [p. 1052 #269]. The book also mentions the sort of philanthropist who views the recipients of charity as “exercise equipment” of self worth.

… hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human … [p. 695]

Eventually, “we enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded engagement in the self” [p. 694]. There is a " … persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive”, where sentiment or feeling equals naïveté. To be human is to be unavoidably sentimental, naive, generally pathetic; in some basic interior way forever infantile.

Desired Fallacy of Fame

Fame is not the exit from any cage [p. 389]

Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such as rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer [p. 291].

One of the tennis boys, LaMount Chu, is obsessed with becoming a famous, recognized tennis player. He wants to be on magazine covers, etc [p. 388]. But Chu’s desire to be famous is paralyzing by itself. Chu avoids risks in order to avoid failure. The fear of losing makes him lose on his ultimate goal.

Ambition has more than one blade. It’s also cutting the beholder.

Lyle asks Chu why he wants to be “famous”, to which Chu responds, “to give life meaning”. Lyle then follows up with, how does being famous make your life meaningful? You think famous people care deeply about being famous? Derive immense meaning? Perhaps at first they derive meaning from the fame, but that meaning is also short-lived [p. 388].

Later in the book, it talks about how to be “famous” — in tennis, it’s referred to as making it to “the Show” — is to become an “entertainer” in some form. And that entertainers are “chewed up” by the machine that is audiences. Once the entertainers have reached a point where they can’t take anymore “chewing”, they give up and again they go back to feeling worthless. Yet, folks still desire to become “famous” [p. 661].

Choosing to Dedicate One’s Life to and Become Something Bigger than Oneself

Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you… You U.S.A.’s do not seem to believe you may each choose what to die for… something bigger than the self. [p. 107]

You are by yourself and alone, kneeling to yourself. [p. 108]

You think there is no love without the pleasure, the no-choice compelling of passion… This whole idea of pleasure and good feeling being what you choose [as love]. To give yourself away to. That all choice for you leads there — this pleasure of not choosing [p. 781].

“Freedom”; “Freedom-from” and “Freedom-to”

… how free are we if you dangle fatal fruit before us and we cannot help ourselves from temptation… [p. 320]

An argument that social media often makes is that they don’t “force” people to use their platform; that people have a choice to use it. Lacking to acknowledge the mental weaknesses of humans, especially when the software is “hijacking” how our brains work e.g., dopamine hits, feeling of acceptance, etc. The book highlights that these are just “the hazards of being free” [p. 320].

… you become the slave who believes he is free. [p. 108]

“[addition’s] a fucking death-in-life [p. 346] … you cannot kill what is already dead [p. 319]” You lose everything to addiction, even yourself. You are now stuck in the cage of addiction that either ends your life or turns it around. While it arguably may not have been your choice to take the “fatal fruit”, you do have a choice now on how to live going forward, even if every single second is a struggle. There are others there to struggle with you.

Everything is Endurable When You Don’t Try to Pull a Weight Greater Than You are Able

Living in the Present. An “endless Now” with containerized moments, where in each container, you are given the opportunity to make a choice [p. 860].

… everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with the unendurable news you then somehow believed [p. 861].

These two snippets have similar themes in that both threaten self-harm in order to avoid doing something more difficult to address the underlying problem.

The Paralyzing Fear of “Failure”

I just can’t achieve the unconsciousness to actually [do] [p. 249].

The fear of the pain is many times worse than the pain of the pain [p. 779].

There is a general recurring theme throughout the book about humbling oneself to a point where you “just be” and only then can you do.

You can’t think about it like an intellectual thing [p. 1002 #90]

In episode 513 with guest Shane Parrish of The Rich Roll Podcast, Rich talked about his struggle with addiction and how being an intellectual made recovery more difficult. It wasn’t until he finally humbled himself enough to just “blindly” follow the steps without thinking intellectually about how simple they are. In Infinite Jest, there is fellow by the name of Geoffrey Day who enters the Ennet Recovery House, and says, “… [they] seem to expect us simply to open up and blindly swallow … parroting, reciting” [p. 272].

… to win enough of the time to be considered successful you have to both care a great deal about it and also not care about it at all. [p. 269]

Lyle, the weird guru “thing” that lives in the weight room that you later find may be a wraith, asks,

…if I were to give you 100 keys, one of which opens the door to success, how many would you try? [p. 199]

All of them? Then you are willing to accept 99% failure rate for success. If you just stand at the door, jingling the keys because you are only willing to try one key, you are a “paralyzed perfectionist”.

Transcending Goals

Anhedonia depression is “emotional novocaine” i.e., depression caused by lack of pleasure or excitement. “… Anhedonia’s often associated with the crisis that afflict extremely goal-oriented people who reach a certain age having achieved all or more then all they’d hoped for. [p. 692]”. Yet we treat this relentless goal-orientedness as “hip” and “cool” i.e., “hustle porn”.

A parable of a donkey being lead by a carrot dangled in front of their face on a stick. In this parable, the carrot is viewed as the grail — i.e., what is trying to be achieved. “Worshipping” the carrot.

… it’s more invigorating to want than to have … [p. 694]

Having nothing to fight for is also to be dead [p. 777]. So like many things in life, it is about balance.

Eric Clipperton was a young tennis player, unaffiliated with any academy, who weaseled his way to rank #1 by carrying a gun with him to tennis matches and threatening suicide if we would happen to lose. However, once he reached rank #1, he ended up killing himself because it was presumably unfulfilling because the ranking wasn’t earned [p. 432].

Similar to Clipperton, another top-ranked jr. tennis player reached the top ranks and when he lost, he was so unprepared for losing that he went home and drank poison. He ended up killing his entire family because they tried to revive him — and then each other — via mouth-to-mouth and ended up being poisoned [p. 436].

… unprepared-goal-attainment-trauma … [p. 436]

Yet another story of reaching “success” is when Randy Lenz’s — a person at the Ennet Recovery House — mother won a settlement, granting her an amount of money she had never experienced before. Lenz’s mother — who was obese — immediately took the money and bought a bunch of peach cobbler and ate so much she ruptured and died [p. 577].

Rather than goals defining our existence, we must prepare to transcend our goals once they are achieved [p. 680]. If you aren’t prepared to transcend your goals, in the book, it is suggested that one of two things will occur;

1. you will realize once you’ve achieved the goal that it wasn’t as fulfilling as you had hoped and expected it to be.
2. you will celebrate achieving the goal obsessively, “Syndrome of the Endless Party” and will become a celebrity who is obsessed by external recognition, which will undoubtably at some point fade and so to will leave you feeling of worthless.

Plot Spoilers

At a macro-level, a group of wheelchair “terrorists” who have demonstrated willingness to forgo self pleasure and ease of life in order to do what is right for the group i.e., separate from the rest of the selfish nations. Throughout the book the terrorist group tries to tap into this fundamental weakness of “self pleasure” that most of the rest of society is unable to overcome in order to push their agenda of separation. Another macro-level theme is to really give life meaning, you must transcend the self and become part of something larger — i.e., a community — who together are dedicated to something. At a micro-level, there is a constant theme of addiction and overcoming addiction by dedicating and humbling oneself to a point where they “blindly swallow” what they are told to do and not dwelling on what caused your addiction or “Disease”. Relieving anxiety by purchasing things is another micro theme throughout [p. 145, 412].

A.F.R. secures and verifies a read-only copy of the film Infinite Jest — the samizdat or “the Entertainment — stolen from the death of Duplessis (???). Someone from E.T.A was working for A.F.R. [p. 724]. The master copy, which was said to have buried in the head [p. 31] of Mr. I., was missing when he was dug up [p. 934]. There were other suggestions that pointed at John Wayne as the E.T.A. resident working with A.F.R. as, for one, he was from Canada. Early in the book, it’s mentioned that John Wayne would have won the major annual tennis tournament that year had he not been with Don Gately and Hal digging up Mr. I.’s grave [p. 17]. John Wayne was ranked 1st at E.T.A. [p. 260]. Was he ranked 1st because he didn’t care about tennis? He wasn’t paralyzing himself with goals, etc.?

Once you forget about external expectations, “let go” and stop intimately caring about and constantly “checkpointing”, whatever it is that you are trying to achieve is when you finally enable yourself to become “successful” is a common, primary, theme throughout the book; spanning the boys at E.T.A., folks at the Ennet Drug Recovery House and members of the A.F.R.

There is also a common theme of prioritizing appearing to be okay over truly being okay. As long as you are able to fake it well, then you tell yourself you are okay. In the book, substance users are worried about what the substance they are abusing does to their teeth more than they are worried about what it is doing to their mind [p. 770]. Similarly, Mrs. I. fakes her feelings and defines herself by her childrens’ reactions so as long as everyone can fake being happy, then she feels that she is okay and a good mother.