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

**Peter Attia** (0:05)
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You know, you said something a moment ago that made me think of one of my favorite talks, so you know that I'm the biggest fan of David Foster Wallace, this person who I've just always been kind of so amazed by his insight. I just, you know, here's a guy who was not a trained psychiatrist, he's a writer, and yet his insights into humanity go beyond almost anything I think. You couldn't learn this stuff in a textbook, and, you know, I've been asked before, like if you could bring anybody back from the dead, you know, of recent era, right, who would it be, and I think it would be him. You know, if I could go back in time and spend a day with anybody, it would probably be with David Foster Wallace.
He has a very famous commencement speech from 2005 that he delivered at Kenyon College, titled This Is Water, and in it he talks about the fact that we're, I think the way he describes it is, there's no such thing as atheism. We are all worshiping some god.
Do you worship money, power, your body, you know, your physical allure?
And he almost makes the case that at least if you pick a god to worship, the harm to you might be less, because if it is money you worship, you'll never have enough. If it's power you worship, you'll never feel strong enough. If it's intellect that you worship, you'll always feel like a fraud. And I remember listening to this for the very first time, which was many years ago, and thinking, yeah, I get that. Like, I really get that. Like, I know I'm not alone, but I think a lot of people who place their self-worth and their intellect, you think, what if people find out I'm not that smart? Like, I'm just a fraud. And, you know, again, it just speaks to this entire nature of humanity. And, of course, the tragedy in the case of David Foster Wallace is that he ends up taking his own life by suicide three years after he gave that talk.
Now, totally unrelated, I want to play something for you. So, I was actually just listening to this today. I hadn't come across this before, but this is an interview with David Foster Wallace and Terry Gross from NPR. 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 you, if I can cue it up on my phone here. Because I thought of you as soon as I heard this, right?

**Terry Gross** (3:26)
You know, I really like the way you talk. You write about a pleasure and how difficult it can be to really achieve.
You write about pleasure in The Infinite Jest, your latest novel. And I'm thinking, you know, one of the things relating to that in Infinite Jest, one of the characters finds that marijuana is no longer a pleasurable experience. It just makes them terribly self-conscious and therefore anxious. And I'm wondering what happens to you when you do something that's supposed to give you pleasure and that just makes you uncomfortable or anxious.

**David Foster Wallace** (4:03)
Boy, I'm not really even sure how to respond to that. Look, a lot of the impetus for writing Infinite Jest was just the fact that I was about 30 and I had a lot of friends who were about 30 and we'd all, you know, been grotesquely overeducated and privileged our whole lives and had better healthcare and more money than our parents did. And we were all extraordinarily sad.