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.

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.

The Devil You Know: Comparing I, Lucifer and Paradise Lost

I’ve recently re-read Glen Duncan’s book I, Lucifer. It’s sort of the Biblical story of the fall of Lucifer from the devil’s perspective. Duncan doesn’t just make Lucifer into someone out to cause chaos. I mean, he does, but just in one person’s life. Entertainment makes Lucifer more intriguing in books, television, music, etc. Another work of literature that made the devil interesting is one of my favorite tales … John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which paints the devil as sort of an anti-hero. The Devil has always been a master storyteller when authors or whomever gives him the mic.

I, Lucifer and Paradise Lost take that premise and run in opposite directions. Both let Lucifer speak for himself, but the similarities mostly stop there. Milton’s Satan is a tragic epic hero. Duncan’s Lucifer is a sardonic London party guest. Together though, they show just how flexible the figure of the Devil can be, and what that says about us.

In Paradise Lost, Satan enters with the gravitas of a fallen general. His speeches are full of classical grandeur: “Better to reign in hell than serve in Heaven.” Milton’s blank verse gives him a dignity that almost rivals God’s. Over the course of the epic poem, that dignity rots. The grand speeches shrink to self-justifications, and Satan’s transformation into a literal serpent mirrors his moral decay.

In I, Lucifer, Duncan skips the slow moral unraveling. His Lucifer arrives already fully modern, fully cynical, and fully shameless. Given one month in a human body (that of a washed-up writer), he narrates in a breezy, pop-culture-savvy monologue. Where Milton’s Satan wraps his rebellion in lofty ideals, Duncan’s Lucifer cheerfully admits it was always about ego, boredom, and refusing to kneel.

Milton’s universe is theological first, dramatic second. Satan’s rebellion is a misuse of free will. He chooses pride over obedience, and the moral lesson is clear: freedom is good only when exercised in harmony with God’s will.

Duncan’s Lucifer would rather set himself on fire than live in “harmony” with anyone else’s will but his own. Free will is the only real prize, even if it comes with loneliness, pain, or damnation. God offers him redemption at the end of his month on Earth; Lucifer declines, not because he can’t repent, but because repentance means surrender.

In Paradise Lost, humanity is collateral damage. Satan tempts Adam and Eve as a strike against God. Milton’s Satan does not care about them beyond their strategic value. In I, Lucifer, humanity is the entertainment. Lucifer adores human art, music, lust, and self-delusion. He mocks humans constantly, but there’s a grudging admiration underneath. He might still ruin your life, but he’ll stay for a drink and ask about your novel.

Milton’s Satan is the stuff of cathedral murals: moral, solemn, and framed by the cosmic stakes of Heaven and Hell. Duncan’s Lucifer is more like the friend who hijacks your bar tab and spends the night dismantling your worldview between shots. One speaks in blank verse; the other in sarcastic asides.

Both invite you into the rebel’s point of view, but where Milton uses the Devil to reinforce divine justice, Duncan uses him to undermine it.

The endgame in Paradise Lost is Satan firmly in Hell, stripped of dignity, an eternal warning against rebellion. I, Lucifer ends with Lucifer walking away grinning, having learned nothing he’s willing to admit, but maybe carrying a few uncomfortable human feelings he can’t quite shake. Milton’s Devil falls because he can’t change. Duncan’s Devil survives because he refuses to.

In both cases, Lucifer is compelling because he’s the ultimate outsider; someone who sees rules, refuses them, and accepts the consequences. Milton’s Satan speaks to our fear of ambition’s cost; Duncan’s Lucifer speaks to our hunger for autonomy in a world that loves telling us what’s good for us.

The Devil, it turns out, reflects whatever rebellion we need at the time. In the 17th century, that meant warning against pride. In the 21st, it might mean laughing in God’s face while ordering another round.

If Milton’s Satan makes you think twice about disobedience, Duncan’s Lucifer makes you want to disobey better.

Without Empathy, We Don’t See People as People

I’ve been recently reading the book James by Percival Everett. It’s about the slave Jim from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It’s gotten me thinking about empathy and the lack of it in humans. Empathy is not just a virtue–it’s the lens through which we recognize the humanity in others. Without it, people become objects, obstacles, or threats. History is soaked in the blood of empathy’s absence and the most chilling atrocities share a common root: the failure to see others as truly human.

The transatlantic slave trade didn’t just rely on violence; it depended on a systemic denial of empathy. Enslaved Africans were stripped of names, families, and identities. In the book I’m reading, Jim is just trying to get back to his family, but he is bought and sold by others in the book. Africans were branded, auctioned, and bred like livestock. This wasn’t ignorance, it was deliberate dehumanization. By turning people into property, slaveholders absolved themselves of guilt. Empathy would have made the cruelty unbearable. So it was repressed, silenced, replaced with pseudoscience and theology that justified oppression.

In Nazi Germany, Jews, Roma, disabled people, and others were targeted in a genocide that industrialized death. What made the Holocaust possible wasn’t just hatred–it was the meticulous suppression of empathy. People were reduced to numbers. Their names erased, their histories burned, their deaths cataloged in ledgers. The architecture of the Holocaust depended on millions participating–guards, secretaries, engineers–many of whom lived normal lives, compartmentalizing their complicity. Empathy had no place in the Final Solution.

But empathy’s absence isn’t just a relic of history. Under Trump’s administration, immigrants and asylum seekers are routinely described as “animals” or “vermin” or “invaders.” Children are separated from their parents and kept in cages, detained by ICE without due process, sometimes without adequate hygiene or comfort. The policy wasn’t a mistake; it was a strategy of deterrence through cruelty. To justify it, the administration relied on rhetoric that erased the humanity of migrants, calling them criminals, rapists, and threats to American “purity.” Empathy was a political liability, and it was treated as such.

Empathy is not weakness. It is an act of defiance in a world that profits from division and fear. To feel for another–to recognize a stranger’s suffering as real–is to refuse the machinery of dehumanization. When we listen, when we care, when we act in solidarity, we’re not just being kind. We’re fighting back against every system that says some lives matter less.

We don’t need more tolerance. We need more imagination: the kind that lets us picture ourselves in someone else’s place. Without empathy, history repeats itself. With it, maybe we can write a better one.

A List of My Heroes and Influences

Albert Camus

Camus resonates with me because of his embrace of the absurd. The Myth of Sisyphus especially hit home for me–the idea of imagining Sisyphus happy reframed how I see struggle. Instead of falling into despair, Camus argues for rebellion against the meaningless of life but finding joy in the absurd. He grounds his philosophy in a deep concern for justice and dignity. His resistance to both authoritarianism and passive resignation speaks to my own drive to disrupt capitalism and push people toward action.

Bill Hicks

Hicks has a sharp political critique with dark humor and a deep disdain for bullshit. His attacks on consumerism, corporate control, and political hypocrisy align with my own frustrations with capitalism and the absurdity of American politics Hicks didn’t just argue against the system; he ridiculed it in ways that exposed its ridiculousness. His jokes weren’t just shock humor, they were a brutal deconstruction of how capitalism co-opts everything, even rebellion. His no-holds-bar critique of America and the American system hits home for me.

Emil Cioran

Cioran strips existence down to its raw, unfiltered absurdity, much like how I see the world. His work speaks to my anti-natalism, misanthropy, and skepticism of grand ideological solutions. Cioran embraces despair with a poetic, almost darkly comedic flair I long to fight capitalism and push people into action, but I also find it exhausting. Cioran embodies that paradox. He was fully aware that everything is meaningless, yet he was still compelled to write, express, and dissect existence with a razor sharp wit.

Doug Stanhope

He blends brutal honesty, dark humor, and a deep contempt for societal norms. His raw no-bullshit take on life, politics, and human stupidity aligns with my own misanthropy, especially his disdain for blind patriotism, capitalism, and pro-natalism He doesn’t care about being a hero or inspiring people, he just calls out the bullshit for what it is.

Che Guevara

He wasn’t just a theorist, he was a man of action. He saw capitalism and imperialism as global enemies that needed to be dismantled everywhere. That kind of commitment resonates with my own view that capitalism just isn’t a local problem, but a systemic one that requires radical disruption. His image represents defiance, struggle, and an unrelenting pursuit of justice.

Malcolm X

Malcolm X wasn’t interested in playing nice with the system or begging for incremental change. He wanted radical transformation just like with my own frustration with passive leftism and half-measures. His ability to evolve is also great. He started as a staunch Black nationalist but later expanded his vision to a broader fight against oppression worldwide.

Arthur Schopenhauer

His view that the “will to live” traps people in a cycle of pointless striving aligns with my belief that bringing new life into the world is ethically indefensible. Unlike other philosophers who try to find meaning in suffering; Schopenhauer just lays it bare: existence is a cruel joke, and the best we can do is minimize suffering. His radical honesty about the bleakness of life, combined with his sharp wit and refusal to engage in false hope makes him a natural fit for my worldview.

Thomas Ligotti

His work embodies a philosophical commitment to cosmic horror and existential dread that mirrors my own views on the futility of existence. Ligotti sees the world as fundamentally indifferent, even hostile to human life. His vision of reality as an empty, uncaring place aligns with my own anti-natalist and absurdist leanings. His writing acknowledges the darkness I find both intellectually and existentially compellling.

Stephen King

This may comes as a shock to you, but Stephen King is a hero of mine because he’s the one who got me to love reading. I started with his books then branched out into others on government, philosophy, other people’s beliefs, etc. His deep cynicism about small-town America and institutions speak to my own skepticism toward power and the status quo. And honestly? He’s just fun to read. His mix of horror, dark humor, and no-nonsense storytelling makes him one of the few mainstream writers who doesn’t feel watered-down, which is something I respect.

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is a relentless critic of capitalism and U.S. imperialism and he backs up his arguments with deep historical and political analysis. He doesn’t just complain, he provides historical context, logical arguments, and a roadmap for action. His work exposes how power operates from corporate media manipulation to government-backed atrocities. His views align with my own desire to challenge capitalism and push for real change.

Peter Kropotkin

Peter Kropotkin showed me that cooperation — not competition — is what can keep society alive, and that real power comes from the bottom up, not the top down. He helped me unlearn the propaganda of capitalism and see that solidarity is not naive — it’s revolutionary.

Revisiting Blood Meridian

I’m currently re-reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, which is one of my top five favorite books of all time. It’s a brutal, hypnotic, and unrelentingly bleak book. McCarthy takes the myth of the American West and rips it apart, exposing it as a landscape of pure, amoral violence. He makes the violence seem surreal and inevitable.

The character of Judge Holden in particular is one of the most haunting literary figures. He’s part philosopher, part warlord, part devil. He embodies a vision of history and human nature that is completely devoid of redemption.

The book doesn’t offer easy conclusions of moral lessons; it just drags you through an endless nightmare and dares you to find meaning in it.

It’s one of those books that leaves you stunned when you finish it. Either you’ll be in awe of it, or you’ll never want to touch it again. Maybe both.

Blood Meridian reshapes how you see literature and maybe even history itself. It’s not just a Western, it’s a cosmic horror novel disguised as a Western. The sheer indifference of the universe in it is chilling, and Judge Holden is the embodiment of that.

Blood Meridian doesn’t just flirt with nihilism, it drags you into the abyss and makes you sit with it. There’s no redemption, no justice, no meaning beyond the endless cycle of violence. Even the protagonist, who seems like he might have a shred of humanity, is ultimately powerless against the chaos of the world. And Judge Holden? He’s basically an immortal force of destruction, dancing through history, laughing at anyone who thinks there’s order or morality. It’s the kind of book that leaves a scar.

There are some lessons in it though:

Violence is inherent to civilization.

McCarthy shows that violence isn’t just a byproduct of civilization but a fundamental part of it. The Glanton Gang’s violence is just business as usual in the American frontier. Human history is driven by war, conquest, and destruction, and making any romanticized view of the past naive.

Manifest Destiny was a Bloodbath.

The novel dismantles the myth of Manifest Destiny as a heroic expansion. The Glanton Gang which were hired to hunt Apaches turns into a lawless death squad, killing indiscriminately for profit. The Westward Expansion wasn’t just about pioneering and opportunity–it was also about genocide, greed, and chaos.

War is God.

Judge Holden represents a kind of cosmic nihilism. He believes that war is the only true human activity, the ultimate law of existence. If he’s right, then morality is just an illusion, and history is nothing but and endless cycle of domination and slaughter.

Fate vs Free Will.

The protagonist seems to have moments where he could choose a different path, but does he really have free will? The Judge suggests that all men are bound to the game of war, whether they admit it or not. The novel leaves open the question of whether the protagonist’s attempts at redemption matter or if he was doomed from the start.

At its core, Blood Meridian is a rejection of comfortable narratives about human nature, history, and morality. It doesn’t tell you what to think; it forces you to look into the abyss and decide for yourself what it means.