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Yeah … sort of, um, who do I live for? What do I believe in, what do I want? I mean, they’re the sorts of questions so profound and so deep they sound banal when you say them out loud.
I think the reason why people behave in an ugly manner is that it’s really scary to be alive and to be human, and people are really really afraid… . That the fear is the basic condition, and there are all kinds of reasons for why we’re so afraid. But the fact of the matter is, is that, is that the job that we’re here to do is to learn how to live in a way that we’re not terrified all the time. And not in a position of using all kinds of different things, and using people to keep that kind of terror at bay. That is my personal opinion.
Well for me, as an American male, the face I’d put on the terror is the dawning realization that nothing’s enough, you know? That no pleasure is enough, that no achievement is enough. That there’s a kind of queer dissatisfaction or emptiness at the core of the self that is unassuagable by outside stuff… . And that our particular challenge is that there’s never been more and better stuff comin’ from the oustide, that seems temporarily to sort of fill the hole or drown out the hole.
I think it’s probably assuagable by internal means. I think those internal means have to be earned and developed, and it has something to do with, um, um, the pop-psych phrase is lovin’ yourself.
It’s more like, if you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it. I know that sounds a little pious.
David Foster Wallace, typed out by hand (just so you know) from “Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself.”
