Infinite Jest and the Test of Boredom

Infinite Jest is one of those books I re-visit a lot on this site. It’s in my top five favorite books of all time. When people ask what it’s about I tell them the surface level answer: It’s about a film so entertaining that people watch it without doing anything else until they die. Oh, and tennis. It’s more than that though. I talked to a friend of mine about it who introduced me to the book in the first place. I told him, “I think, at its core, Infinite Jest is a book about our inability to deal with boredom.” Not even our inability, our refusal. It’s about the sheer panic that rises in us when we’re left alone with our thoughts, without a screen or distraction to drown out the noise inside.

The author — David Foster Wallace — saw boredom as the truest test of freedom. Not freedom in the political sense, but the freedom to exist without the constant need to be entertained. The freedom to pay attention — to life, to others, to ourselves — without numbing out. The irony, of course, is that we’ve built a society where that kind of freedom feels unbearable.

The book also tackles addiction, and the addicts in Infinite Jest aren’t just addicted to substances, they’re addicted to escape. To anything that shields them from the crushing weight of unfiltered consciousness. But Wallace’s genius was showing that this isn’t limited to drug users. We all have our fix. Some people chase achievement. Some chase pleasure. Some chase attention. The forms change, but the hunger doesn’t.

At the center of the book is “the Entertainment,” a film so irresistibly pleasurable that viewers lose the will to do anything but watch it until they die. It sounds absurd, but it’s not that far off. Every endless scroll, every algorithmic loop, every dopamine hit of digital validation is a step toward that same self-erasure. Wallace wrote the book in the 1990s, but he saw where we were heading: a culture where overstimulation replaces meaning, and distraction becomes the dominant mode of existence.

What makes the book so overwhelming — so sprawling, so labyrinthine — is that it mirrors the chaos of modern consciousness. The fragmented attention, the tangled connections, the endless search for something that feels real. The structure itself resists our hunger for easy satisfaction. You can’t skim it; you have to wrestle with it. And maybe that’s the point. Reading it is an act of resistance against the same forces it warns about.

Wallace once said that “the real, profound boredom” we experience in everyday life is where freedom begins. But to get there, we have to stop running from it. We have to stop medicating every quiet moment with noise. Boredom is uncomfortable because it strips us bare. It forces us to confront who we are when we’re not performing, producing, or consuming.

That’s the real terror of the book. Not addiction, not death, not even despair, but the silence underneath it all. The realization that maybe we’ve built our entire lives around avoiding ourselves.

In that sense, the novel is both a warning and a mirror. It asks whether we can still be present in a world designed to keep us from ever being present. It asks whether we can stand the boredom long enough to rediscover what’s real.

Boredom, it turns out, isn’t the enemy. It’s the doorway back to awareness. It’s where meaning has been hiding all along: in the space we’re just too afraid to enter.

What Comes After Capitalism?

I hate capitalism, not as an abstract idea, but as the system that defines every hour of our lives. It’s built on exploitation: profit over people, hoarding over fairness, and the systematic creation of suffering so a few can live in excess.

You can see it everywhere: hospitals run like businesses, housing treated like a commodity, education turned into debt. Every “crisis” under capitalism — housing, climate, healthcare — isn’t a malfunction. It’s the system functioning exactly as designed.

Capitalism isn’t natural. It’s a historical stage, and it’s one that’s exhausted itself. The ruling class tells us “poverty is falling” as if global misery is acceptable collateral for billionaire wealth. But inequality isn’t an accident; it’s the engine that keeps capitalism running. When you work, you create more value than you’re paid for. That unpaid labor becomes profit which is extracted and accumulated until the very people who create everything own nothing. That’s not a bug. That’s the core contradiction: workers create all wealth but control none of it.

So the next move isn’t just hating capitalism. It’s organizing against it. Protests, memes, and writing all matter, but their goal must be to build class consciousness: to connect the struggles we already see — over housing, over healthcare, over dignity — into a unified fight for worker power.

We can’t reform a system built on exploitation. We have to replace it with one run democratically by workers for the common good.

The question isn’t whether capitalism deserves to fall. The question is: are we ready to build what comes after?

Invoke Your Inner Sherman

General William Tecumseh Sherman didn’t burn down Atlanta because he liked fire, no. He did it because half-measures don’t end wars. When a system is built on exploitation, you don’t ask it nicely to stop. You cut off its supply lines, starve its profits, and march through its illusions until it can’t function anymore. That’s what invoking your inner Sherman means: refusing to play by rules written to keep you docile.

The enemy today isn’t just wearing gray uniforms; it’s wearing suits, logos, and smiling PR campaigns. It runs on credit cards, ad clicks, and direct compliance. Its railroads are digital, its depots are data centers, its morale is built on your exhaustion.

So stop feeding it.

Invoke your inner Sherman when you:

Cancel your Amazon Prime account and help a mutual aid group instead.

Expose corruption, exploitation, or hypocrisy–loudly and publicly.

Withdraw your labor, your money, your silence.

Coordinate with others to hit where it hurts: revenue, reputations, reach.

Turn apathy into disruption, confusion into strategy, and outrage into logistics.

You don’t need to burn cities. Just burn the illusion that this system is unshakable.

Sherman didn’t wait for permission. He moved with purpose, precision, and total commitment to the goal. That’s what wins. That’s how we end things that refuse to end themselves. Be ruthless; not with people, but with the forces that profit off their suffering. Be relentless, but not in hate, but in resolve. Be strategic, not just loud.

They fear chaos, but what they really fear is organized chaos. That’s what Sherman unleashed. That’s what we must become.

Light no fires, just movements. And never stop marching.

The Fight Club Problem

Women have Little Women, Lady Bird, Thelma and Louise, Fried Green Tomatoes; entire genres that let them explore identity, friendship, love, ambition, and transformation. They can laugh, fall apart, rebuild, reinvent. Men, meanwhile, get two movies: Fight Club and Dead Poet’s Society.

Those are our emotional instruction manuals. One says, “Beat the shit out of something until you feel alive.” The other says, “Feel something pure and beautiful … and then die for it.” That’s it. What’s the meaning? Become violent. Want beauty? Die tragically.

Both films are about suffocation. Tyler Durden and John Keating are mythic anecdotes to systems that crush men into obedient shells: capitalism and conformity. But look closer: neither story offers real freedom. Fight Club ends in collapse. Dead Poet’s Society ends in death. There’s no “after.” No reinvention. No softness that survives.

Women’s stories stretch across genres because culture allows them emotional variety. Men’s stories are narrower, louder, more terminal. We’re either punching our way to purpose or leaping out the windows of it.

It’s not that Fight Club and Dead Poet’s Society are bad movies. They’re fantastic. It’s just that they’re lonely ones. They’re cinematic islands for men starving for meaning in a culture that never taught them how to live without performing it. Maybe it’s time that men got more than two options.

Le Petite Mort

There’s a strange kind of peace that comes from staring directly into the abyss … not fighting it, not dramatizing it, but simply accepting that one day, you’ll vanish. For most people, death is something to fear, something to push away. For me, it’s a thought I return to over and over; not out of despair, but out of fascination. It’s the one truth that strips away every illusion: that everything eventually ends.

I that recognition, I find release. The French call the orgasm la petite mort: “the little death.” It’s a fitting metaphor. Both moments dissolve the boundaries of the self. Both are acts of surrender; a letting go of control, of identity, of being. When I surrender to that thought of death, it isn’t about self-destruction. It’s about self-erasure, the brief, merciful disappearance of everything that hurts, wants, or demands.

Afterward there’s calm but also emptiness. The kind that stretches out like a vast sky after a storm: clear, still, but almost too large to bear. It’s not depression, exactly. It’s awareness. The body feels small, the world fragile, and life itself strangely tender.

Philosophers like Camus, Cioran, and Bataille all circled this paradox: that to truly live, one must learn to die — not physically, but inwardly. To give up the constant struggle to hold on. To see existence not as a fight, but as a flow. In that surrender, something sacred flickers. It’s not meaning, but the freedom from needing any.

Maybe that’s what this ritual really is: a way of touching that freedom for a moment, of dissolving into the inevitable and calling it peace.

The Product

There’s a factory somewhere that manufactures meaning. Nobody knows where it is, but we all buy what it makes. You can’t survive without it. Every morning, I wake up to the same alarm sound — like a shriek filtered through cheap optimism — and I clock in at my terminal, typing things for other people who think they’re changing the world by moving numbers around. The boss says we’re “innovators.” I say we’re dream janitors, sweeping up what’s left of hope.

At night, I scroll through faces that look like me: sleep-deprived, smiling, sedated by purpose. They post about “grind culture” and “mindfulness,” like saints of a new religion where salvation costs $9.99 a month.

I used to believe I was different. I wrote poetry. I loved someone once. Then I started to feel the product wearing off. It began small. A crack in the script. I’d catch myself staring at my reflection in a window not recognizing the thing looking back. Like someone had replaced me with a cheaper copy, printed on recycled despair. My laugh started to sound overdubbed. The air smelled faintly of disinfectant and resignation.

I told my therapist. She smiled, a perfect mechanical crescent, and asked if I’d tried “meaning supplements.” She handed me a sample pack. They were glossy pills the color of television static. “Swallow one before sleep,” she instructed.

That night, I dreamed of the factory. Rows of bodies in chairs, their eyes wired open, pupils projected onto screens. Every time one blinked, a machine printed out a new slogan: Live. Laugh. Persist. The air was thick with burnt plastic and serotonin. I tried to run, but my legs dissolved into assembly lines.

When I woke up, my mouth tasted like melted silicon. The mirror showed me someone else entirely. It was the same face, but smoother. Cleaner. My pores had been edited out. My thoughts too.

I went back to work and everyone looked perfect. No one blinked anymore. The boss said we’d hit a new quarterly record. He clapped, but the sound was hollow, like hands slapping a coffin lid.

Now, sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can hear the factory humming under everything: under the city, under my heartbeat, under the polite noise of civilization.

We’re not employees. We’re inventory.

Every morning when I swallow the next pill, I understand a little more: the product is us.

Why Euphoria is Illegal

I was recently prescribed Briviact for my epilepsy. It’s a newer medication which means there’s no generic form so I won’t be able to get it refilled unless the tariffs are lifted. I got some samples from the doctor’s office though which is a good thing. I research my meds when I take them and I learned that this one is a controlled substance. I wondered why. It’s a seizure medication. It’s not like it’s fentanyl or meth or something that makes you hallucinate. It’s because it causes euphoria. In other words: it can make you feel good. And somehow, that’s against the law.

That tells you everything you need to know about how this system views pleasure.

Drug laws in the U.S. weren’t built on science. They were built on moral panic and social control. Cocaine was criminalized when Black workers used it. Opium was outlawed when Chinese immigrants used it. Marijuana became illegal when Mexican immigrants used it. Every time “protect the public” was the excuse, but the real goal was control: control of behavior, control of consciousness, control of who gets to feel good and how.

The modern drug war still follows that logic. Feeling good isn’t criminal if you buy it from the right people. Alcohol, caffeine, prescription meds, streaming services, endless entertainment are all perfectly legal ways to numb yourself while staying productive and docile. Those industries make billions helping people escape, just enough to keep functioning.

But if you find a way to feel good without permission — without profit flowing upward — suddenly it’s a “public health crisis.” Suddenly you’re “abusing” pleasure.

The DEA says some drugs must be tightly regulated because they “cause euphoria.” But really, that’s code for “they might remind you that there’s more to life than work, debt, and stress.” They might make you want more from existence than the treadmill of consumption.

So the state steps in to keep your happiness manageable, your relief rationed, your joy prescribed. Euphoria is a threat, but not to your body … to your obedience.

It’s not that feeling good is against the law. It’s that feeling good outside of capitalism’s rules is.

Panem et Circenses in 2025

The Roman satirist Juvenal wrote that the masses of his day no longer cared for politics or justice. All they wanted was “panem et circenses”, bread and circuses. As long as the state kept them fed and entertained, they would tolerate corruption, cruelty, and decay.

Fast forward two thousand years, and America is running the same playbook.

The “bread” comes in the form of bare-minimum survival: Social Security under constant attack, wages that don’t keep up with rent, food assistance treated like a privilege. The ruling class never allows enough to thrive, only enough to keep people working, consuming, and afraid to lose what little they have.

The “circuses” are endless. Culture wars dominate the headlines while wages stagnate. Trump performs like a professional wrestler, throwing insults and manufacturing enemies for the crowd to boo. Media corporations serve up nonstop drama — from celebrity meltdowns to political theater — so long as it keeps people glued to their screens and not in the streets. Meanwhile, the real show goes unseen: corporate tax breaks, union-busting, deregulation, mass surveillance, and endless war. The bread gets thinner, the circuses get louder.

But history shows us something important: empires can only distract their people for so long. Rome collapsed under its own contradictions. Capitalism in 2025 is not immune.

The question is whether we stay in the stands, cheering while the empire crumbles, or whether we organize, educate, and fight to build something better.

Candide Through an Absurd and Anti-Natalist Lens

I finished Voltaire’s Candide. I bought it I don’t know how long ago, but I’d get distracted with other books as I often do and just forgot about it until recently. All I can say is “Wow!” It was an excellent satire of philosophy in general. Me, being who I am though, I read it through a lens of pessimism, absurdism, and anti-natalism. It’s surprisingly modern and disturbingly relevant.

Right from the start the main character — Candide — and his world are full of relentless misfortune: he starts out expelled from his home, pushed into a brutal army; he witnesses earthquakes, massacres, and hangings. Everywhere he goes, human cruelty and disaster dominate.

For someone like me that’s attuned to anti-natalist thought, the lesson is clear: life is unpredictably cruel, and no amount of idealism or hope can shield anyone from suffering. The character of Pangloss and his philosophy — “this is the best of all possible worlds” — is not comforting. It’s absurd. Voltaire mocks it precisely to show that optimism can blind us to reality.

Candide meets kings unthroned, slaves chained to oars, prostitutes forced by circumstance, and monks trapped in religious life against their will. From the sites of Libson to El Dorado and Paris to Venice, suffering is universal. It doesn’t discriminate by wealth, status, or virtue.

All of this perfectly aligns with anti-natalism. Why bring new life into a world so unpredictable, so cruel, and so universally painful? Voltaire’s stories of absurdly recurring disasters reinforce the ethical argument that procreation inevitably imposes suffering on others. Human ideas are fragile. Pursuits that seem meaningful such as love, wealth, status, and fame often collapse under the weight of reality. For an absurdist like myself, this is expected. The universe offers no inherent purpose and our “ideals” are more likely than not arbitrary constructs.

The end of the book says “We must cultivate our garden.” This is Voltaire’s practical work. Life is absurd and full of suffering, but we can still create meaning in small, tangible ways: tending to our responsibilities, helping others, or our own little personal projects. For an absurdist anti-natalist this means to me:

Accept the universe’s lack’s lack of inherent meaning. Do what you can to reduce suffering wherever possible. And focus on tangible, ethical, or creative work rather than abstract speculation.

So, what did I take away from the satirical work? I learned through its absurd coincidences, relentless misfortunes, and philosophical debates that it mirrors these truths: life is cruel, unpredictable, and often meaningless.

However, like Candide, we are not powerless. We can act, work, and cultivate our little gardens in such a chaotic world, and in doing so, carve out a fragile, ethical, and perhaps even joyful corner of existence.

Favorite Books #6-10

A while back, I gave you a list of my top 5 favorite books. It’s taken me some time and a lot of thinking to think of numbers 6-10, but I think I’ve got them. So, here they are:

6. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti

Ligotti’s philosophical pessimism is a cold and meditative. It’s about the horrors of consciousness and human suffering. He argues that awareness itself is a curse, and it’s a theme that lingers in your brain long after you finish the book.

7. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The main character embodies self-loathing, resentment, and intellectual rebellion. His critique of optimism exposes the contradictions of human desire and freedom which reveals our capacity for irrationality and cruelty.

8. Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche

I know I’ve moved away from Nietzsche over the years, but this book was my introduction to philosophy. It helped me discover other philosophers and led me to my favorite (Albert Camus.) This book challenges traditional morality, urging the creation of new values. It’s sometimes difficult, but it’s also poetic and absurd which I love. It insists we confront the void with courage and creativity.

9. Pet Sematary by Stephen King

The author that made me a lover of reading and books in general. It’s still the most terrifying book I’ve ever read. It isn’t just about the supernatural. It’s a meditation on grief, denial, and the impossibility of reversing death. It confronts us with the inevitability of loss and the consequences of trying to cheat the natural order.

10. Blindness by Jose Saramago

A society stripped of sight which exposes the fragility and moral ambiguity of civilization. It’s a very grim reflection on human nature. Survival instincts clash with morality which can lead to brutality. It’s been a while since I read it, but it still lingers in the back of my mind so I had to put it on the list.