David Foster Wallace:
“In his 1992 essay “E Unibus Pluram,” he calls this a “new vision of the USA as an atomized mass of self-conscious watchers and appearers.”
Our Shared Reality Is About to Self-Destruct
Instead of participating in a “community of relationships,” he said, we become locked into “networks of strangers connected by self-interest and contest and image.” He believed this loneliness led to widespread depression—a condition with which he suffered intensely.
Wallace also understood how, though screen entertainments helped him escape from depression, they simultaneously led to even more disconnection and loneliness. He knew that the most dangerous part of the screen entertainment is the illusion that it serves us.
The reality is that we actually serve tech platforms and their advertisers.
“Entertainment’s chief job is to make you so riveted by it that you can’t tear your eyes away, so the advertisers can advertise.”
Wallace acknowledged at that time that his addiction was to television…….. How much worse is the atomizing effect of screens now with the proliferation of Personal Digital Assistants? He was never able to reconnect in a meaningful way relationally to people in “real life” and committed suicide in 2008.
For your mental health, fast from media periodically. Go out with friends. Talk on the phone. Sit in silence and read a book.
