The desire to quit reading and writing in the technological age.

Or, David Foster Wallace asks, "Why are we watching so much shit?"

There is no better physical manifestation of the passage of time than your passport and credit cards expiring. Years—five, ten—simply gone with the wind. I’m not a teenager anymore, I realize as my plasticity gives way to rigidity, or so I am told.

“What horrifies me most,” wrote Sylvia Plath in her journals, “is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.” Tragically, Plath never lived long enough to fade into “an indifferent middle age.” If she had, she would have bloomed into it instead—if only. I’m afraid I share Plath’s fears as I approach the age she never grew past.

Growing old is scary yet none of us want to die young. Death scares us all yet life derives its meaning from its finitude. In his moral essay On The Shortness of Life, the stoic philosopher Seneca wrote, “In guarding their fortune men are often closefisted, yet, when it comes to the matter of wasting time, in the case of the one thing in which it is right to be miserly, they show themselves most extravagant.”

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it,” wrote Seneca. Never has this been truer than in the algorithmic doomscrolling era of the 21st century—a time when the Oxford word of the year is declared as “brain rot.” Rising rates of depression, declining rates of attention, and an entire generation being labeled “anxious”—one look around and it is hard to deny something must have gone very wrong in the past decade.

Recently, I was reading David Lipsky’s 2010 book Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace. The book is a transcript of an extended interview of Wallace that Lipsky took in 1995 during a 5-day road trip on the last leg of Wallace’s book tour for his famous novel Infinite Jest.

“I’m not saying there’s something sinister or horrible or wrong with entertainment,” Wallace told Lipsky. “I’m saying it’s—I’m saying it’s a continuum. And if the book’s about anything, it’s about the question of why am I watching so much shit? It’s not about the shit; it’s about me. Why am I doing it?”

[…]

“You know, why are we—and by ‘we’ I mean people like you and me: mostly white, upper middle class or upper class, obscenely well educated, doing really interesting jobs, sitting in really expensive chairs, watching the best, you know, watching the most sophisticated electronic equipment money can buy—why do we feel empty and unhappy?”

In 1995, Wallace pretty much summed up our current state of mental and social decline. Here is an excerpt from the book where he talks, almost prophetically, about the impact of television on society and what the internet would lead us to if we are careless in its usage:

“I think one of the reasons that I feel empty after watching a lot of TV, and one of the things that makes TV seductive, is that it gives the illusion of relationships with people. It's a way to have people in the room talking and being entertaining, but it doesn't require anything of me. I mean, I can see them, they can't see me. And, and, they're there for me, and I can, I can receive from the TV, I can receive entertainment and stimulation. Without having to give anything back but the most tangential kind of attention. And that is very seductive. The problem is it's also very empty. Because one of the differences about having a real person there is that number one, I've gotta do some work. Like, he pays attention to me, I gotta pay attention to him. You know: I watch him, he watches me. The stress level goes up. But there's also, there's something nourishing about it, because I think like as creatures, we've all got to figure out how to be together in the same room. And so TV is like candy in that it's more pleasurable and easier than the real food. But it also doesn't have any of the nourishment of real food. And the thing, what the book is supposed to be about is, What has happened to us, that I'm now willing—and I do this too—that I'm willing to derive enormous amounts of my sense of community and awareness of other people, from television? But I'm not willing to undergo the stress and awkwardness and potential shit of dealing with real people. And that as the Internet grows, and as our ability to be linked up, like—I mean, you and I coulda done this through e-mail, and I never woulda had to meet you, and that woulda been easier for me. Right? Like, 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.”

Unfortunately for us all, Wallace was right—technology did get better and it got much easier and convenient and pleasurable to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Spending time on social media and the internet has become the “main staple of our diet” and we are all the worse for it.

I remember being in middle school, an entire lifetime ago or so it seems, and absolutely bingeing on books, Harry Potter specifically. I would read all day and all night, sometimes 12 hours straight, until dawn, until I could no longer keep my eyes open. I am sure many people who are reading this feel the same. I remember being in high school, what seems like just yesterday, and being lost in writing poetry.

Then, sometime in college, I lost my love for reading. It was a slow death. The more self-help books I read to help my then-self, the less joy I found in reading until one day I stopped entirely. Read enough badly written self-help cash-grab and one is sure to forget the joy a good book can bring.

It was sometime in my mid-twenties that I decided to become a reader again. Thousands of feet in the air, as I flew across the world in a tin cylinder, legs cramped in the charitable economy seat and body crammed in the middle seat between two older gentlemen who would not relinquish the armrests, I found my love for reading in the beautiful prose of Charles Dickens.

“Now, I return to this young fellow. And the communication I have got to make is, that he has Great Expectation,” said Mr. Jaggers notifying Pip of his turning fortunes as I flew across the Atlantic ocean. It was love at first sight: with Dickens, with Pip, heck even with the cold-hearted Estella.

There I was, a reader again. I found company in Dickens and Donna Tartt, in Anthony Doerr and Dostoevsky, in Amy Tan and Tolstoy, in Min-Jin Lee and Murakami. As I read more, I started to write more. As I wrote more, I started to post more on the internet. It was an innocuous desire to share my thoughts and my words and find a community of people who thought like me, wrote like me, and liked me for my words. I didn’t realize at the time how easy it was to slip and fall into the validation trap—a constant “look at me” while running on the content treadmill. Soon, it felt like I was simply feeding the machinery, selling vulnerability to strangers for a shot of cheap validation.

Feeling like a fraud, I started reading less again. I wrote less. I scrolled more. My relationship with reading and writing became unhealthy and unsustainable as soon as the algorithmic incentives of social media and the internet started dictating the content and the cadence of my work. The feedback structure of the internet means eventually I end up tying my self-worth to the number of views and likes my writing gets—how many eyeballs see the words I write and how many fingers hit the little digital heart as a way of telling me “you’re doing great, buddy.” And I, an addict searching for his next hit of ego gratification, stand up high on a pedestal like Ozymandius and shout, “Look at my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

In this post-Wallace world, we find ourselves in the middle of a neverending stream of look-at-me-and-I’ll-look-at-you. All of us, willingly or unwillingly, have become part of the content treadmill—producers and consumers—selling our lives to the algorithms. We might as well attach a “For Sale“ sign to each of our lives.

While there is beauty in having the ability to see different minds and different lives that are on display across the globe—never before was a different lifestyle, a different culture, and a different way of thinking so easily accessible—harm ensues when that becomes an infinite stream pouring out of a 6-inch window in our hands, served by faceless algorithms that seem to know us better than we know ourselves, tracking our every move in exchange for a few tasteless cookies. When everything I consume is novel, the novelty of the entire experience wears off.

On many days, spending so much time in the digital world, I am left wondering what I did that day in my actual—IRL—life. Even though I spent so much time with these people on the internet, why do I still feel so alone and lonely sitting in my dark room in front of this bright screen?

David Foster Wallace was right. He could see even pre-Y2K what the world was headed toward. He was afraid of what TVs would do to us but what happens when that TV runs 24x7 with endless programming served algorithmically directly to everyone right in their hands? What happens when it’s not just Hollywood that gets to create the shows but everybody everywhere can create their own shows and serve them to the neverending feeds all at once? What happens when all those people are given incentives, monetary and dopaminergic, for endlessly turning their lives into content? What happens when Big Tech decides to take all of that user-generated content and feed it into AI algorithms (the morality and legality of which is gray at best) that can then create endless feeds of more content for the people, served based on their interests, right into the same glowing screens, possibly even more advanced screens built right into their glasses? How about putting people in an entirely digital environment for a few thousand dollars so they can forget about the real world? One might ask, out of curiosity, what about people and friends and human relationships? Who cares! Why not just give them digital avatars so everyone can simply hang out in virtual worlds? How about digital friends hanging from their necks in a wi-fi-enabled locket that they can talk to instead of talking to people around them? Who wants to meet in person anyway? Who even needs human beings if your entire being could be digitized? Isn’t that a much better world? An entire world merely alive to maximize shareholder value as it devalues the existence of the human.

There’s a deep discontent in living a life that is constantly pushed into content generation and optimization. While the internet has brought on powerful tools leading to many opportunities, because the changes have happened at such a rapid pace, we have been left behind. We could not evolve at the pace of the technological evolution. “Now, if I don't develop some machinery for being able to turn off pure unalloyed pleasure,” Wallace said to Lipsky in 1995, “and allow myself to go out and, you know, grocery shop and pay the rent? I don't know about you, but I'm gonna have to leave the planet.”

We need to educate ourselves and prepare ourselves, somehow build that “machinery in our guts” Wallace talked about decades ago so that we can handle this new world we find ourselves in. With the global deterioration of mental health, including my own to be frank, it feels utterly essential to do so.

I don’t have the answers. I don’t have the tools. At this moment, all I can do is separate my self-worth from the view count and do things without the need for the algorithm’s validation. I can live a life without feeling the compulsion to share everything about it on the internet. Maybe it’s just me and most other people are better equipped to deal with all this. And if not, if you find yourself struggling like me, all I can do is wish you good luck and if you have any strategies or advice, I’m all ears.

If everyone creates then who keeps the world running? If no one creates then what's the point of keeping the lights on? What is this weird needy symbiotic relationship between the ones who create and the ones who consume?

Yet, here I am. Writing all this and putting it on the internet for you to read, hoping you'll agree and like what I'm writing—my ideas, my words. The irony is not lost on me. But what then is the alternative? To pull the plug entirely and to hell with all things online? I don't want to want the validation from you yet I know I want it, otherwise I'd be writing this in my journal. A writer needs a reader, just as a reader needs a writer—another symbiotic, almost parasitic, relationship at play, producers and consumers.

How do we—I—create a better relationship with creation? Is there a sustainable way to create art for art’s sake and to share it with the world without wanting to leave this planet?