It’s funny that the more distance I get from Infinite Jest, the more I comprehend and appreciate it as the sprawling work of intellect that it is. It’s very much about having a greater understanding of myself and my own life now as well. It’s about my own evolution, or rather the evolution of self-understanding, and hence compassion, empathy and understanding for what everyone else is going through as well. I am them. They are me. We are more than alike. We are the same.

I hope this video stays up on Youtube for a while. That’s the problem with blogging videos from 3rd party sources. They will usually disappear after a period of time and you’re left with the words you used to describe the video. That in mind it’s probably best that the video posted describe my words instead of the other way around. That said:

Quoting as closely as memory allows: The word addiction is rooted in the Latin ‘addicere’ which means religious devotion.

Yes.

Relating it to my own life, as a man in recovery, I spent decades pursuing a sense of well-being that seemed to only come from these chemical substances I consumed. Beating that chemical addiction though did not make me ‘not an addict.’ My system no longer craves that specific release but it’s still conditioned to seek well-being or a sense of comfort. There are scads of paths to this, and again with distance, the same behaviors are entirely visible in everyone around me. I observe, for example, people getting nervous as their trains pull into the station. They raise their mobile phones (if they’re not already raised) to ensure the signal to reconnect them to their well-being gets to them as soon as it’s available. They finger and swipe the screens feverishly. They look down. They look out the door window for the fastest egress to the strongest signal. They open communication or entertainment apps. They check to make sure their last messages are sent or to see if new missives have come in. They risk their safety as they move about disconnected from the moving, physical world around them. Single-minded, they are screaming for the instant fix.

I lived that way for years. Every moment away from my “higher pursuit” seemed an annoyance at the very least, but usually edged on crisis. There were my pursuits. My addiction. And then there were the moments in between. How many moments are still those in between, while I chase after some new (if less harmful) fix? Do I place any value at all on the activities that aren’t in my list of new fixes, or distractions, or (and this is the most dangerous fix) my pleasures.

That’s where we have to look, at the scale. Place all your pleasures and passions on one side. Place all your needs on the other (not that I’m entirely dismissing the very real need for pleasure). Which weighs more? And how many of your passions are about pleasure or distraction? Bear in mind that passions and pleasures are absolutely not the same thing. They are not synonyms, nor is pleasure the root of passion. Not necessarily anyway. That really needs to be examined. I’ve written in the past about the true nature of passion and what exactly it means, and probably will write more in the future.

That’s a bit of a tangent, but ask yourself this? How much of your spare time is spent seeking out activities that bring relief (not just release)? My instinct and experience is that if most of your time is spent in the pursuit of relief, then you’re as much an addict as I ever was. I had a long argument about that with a girlfriend who stated with argumentative certainty that though she came from a family of alcoholics, she was absolutely not an addictive personality. I pointed out that she spent an inordinate amount of time tuning out, pulling the blinds, turning off the phone and disappearing into a weekend of dozens of movies. I asked her what made her television different than my bottle when both of us had lost the ability to interact with the world at large and turned to the relief of an outside source. Her answer was that it simply wasn’t the same and that I didn’t understand what addiction was about at all.

She said it just wasn’t the same.

Okay.

I see it otherwise. I do, in fact, witness the micro-symptoms of addiction in every moment of life among other humans. We are a society… a culture… with a religious devotion to instant relief at our fingertips. Alcohol/drugs, television/media, social media, mobile phones, food, sex, romance and more. We chase these things desperately, and are then forced to live in all these uneasy, in between moments. We have increasingly devalued everything that is not relief or distraction or pleasure.

David Foster Wallace saw it, though of course he wasn’t alone. I didn’t see it so clearly when I first read Infinite Jest and hence had mixed feelings about the value of the novel. I’m inclined now to put a lot more value in IJ than I would have ten years ago reading it. I tie it back in to my increased understanding of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. The relationship between the drug producers, the vendors and the consumers is a lot more clear. Clear and clearly visible, really. It’s all over the place and as I mentioned just yesterday, all lines between the personal and the commerce have been erased. We live out layers of addiction in our day to day lives. It may be easier for me, having learned to recognize the “jones” to know when I’m acting out on it. It’s certainly easier to recognize it around me.

This is The Age of Self-Medication.

Self-immolation.

This could very well be the least self-aware age that The West has ever known. We are so far removed from the struggle to meet primary needs (shut up, Maslow) that we don’t even have a self. We don’t have defined roles so we’re left imitating bad art – Life imitating bad art. We are fluid and we are costumed, and we are very much empty. We are so caught up in the jonesing that we have lost EMPaThY. I do believe that empathy is what needs to happen to reconnect and get real relief. So, not to be too corny but EMPTY & AH = EMPATHY. That’s where the real relief will be, so we will not be left with all the horrible moments in between. And this trite wrap-up isn’t really where I meant to go, but let’s consider this unfinished.