It's about participatory self-awareness.
Infinite Jest: Unearthing What it Means to be Human
There are things that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being. Half of Infinite Jest dramatizes what makes it tough. The other half dramatizes the fact that we still are human beings, now. Or can be. Being human is hard because we're imperfect, and our hearts are crushed by loving imperfect people. And none of us, no matter how privileged our backgrounds, escapes the suffering-of-the-damned. So it's no wonder we're seduced by The Entertainment, to constantly numb our agonizing human emotions. But by succumbing to The Entertainment's hypnotic lure, we begin a slow death, because we won't spend the necessary time in quiet contemplation required to nourish the part of ourselves that makes us human. This struggle against the constant urge to disengage is played out within all of us like a tennis tournament, pitting our True-selves against the haunts of past traumas, where in the final match, we'll have to face-off against the ghost, Himself. We dare not step onto the court distracted and intoxicated, lest our play be purely defensive with every knee-jerk reaction dictated by our opponent. We can only win the match by 'controlling the point' and resist becoming a mere spectator of life. We have to get active in order to transition through the Gateway to being more than just a creãtus - more than just an automaton seeking food and pleasure - no longer just a figurant in the background - isolated under glass and tortured by our worst fears. And If we are brave enough to unmask ourselves and stand naked in public, reaching out while fully exposed, we'll make it possible to be touched in return by genuine human kindness, the type that sets us 'on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things.'
The lure of Entertainment has always offered an escape from the terror of death-before-life - a means to be whisked away via a temporary anesthesia, as if taking a doctor-prescribed opioid. Such addictive temptations aren't new. Byzantine erotica titillated subjects of the Pax Romana 2000 years ago. But Entertainment has mutated faster than mans’ ability to evolve mechanisms to adapt to it. We're no longer merely in the proximity of distracting objects, like sexually explicit sculptures, painted images on pottery and erotic flooring mosaics - temptations that would have been possible to ignore with a mere turn of the head, but today’s ensnarement's are so pervasive they’re literally at our fingertips at every moment, seducing us with psychologically manipulative click-bate: moving us further away from our True Self. By indulging in these seemingly irresistible urges to escape, we're ensnared by The Entertainment's smiley-face of false fulfillment and rationalized excuses to where we no longer spend any essential time in uncomfortable self-reflection. And the most important part of ourselves remains unfed and dies.
Because we crave pain-numbing dopamine-highs we’ll repeatedly pull the red-lever to release life’s toxic sugar-pellet, no matter how irreversibly destructive the outcome, doing it again and again: killing ourselves slowly, consciously or not, rather than spend a few moments with our own terrifying human emotions. Running from what we fear is so addictive that we'll go crazy when the sugar-pellet is taken away, because it's been the only means we've known of getting through the day. So until we evolve stronger mechanisms to resist The Entertainment's seductive lure, we'll remain at its mercy, tempted by an ever widening array of red-levers, each one serving the same purpose - Distraction - distraction from the things that make us real human beings. These might be the less obvious type, like sports-goals, career success, accumulating social-media ‘likes,’ or the more destructive kind like drugs, sex-with-strangers, branding ourselves with our chosen cult's pre-approved insignia - oblivious to the paradox of our uniform individuality. But more often than not, the distraction is more subtle and more invasive and comes from the most common drug of all - video, handheld shorts or otherwise, with its externally applied intrusive electrodes, poked optically into our brains with a distorted randy lens, enticing us to succumb to the temptation to numb our minds and remain in the cradle where everything is out of focus.
We’ll always be drawn to the regular dopamine-hits of The Entertainment, like lustful boys to the nude PGOAT. But by relinquishing control of ourselves to what's Out-There, our ability atrophies until we no longer know how to drive. That’s why it’s vital to stay vigilant, like being on the nightshift watch at Ennet house, to be on-guard and consciously decide, at every moment, which Higher Power we’re going to worship, which one we're going to give our lives away to. Because some-one or some-thing is always driving. And if we don't provide the direction ourselves we're demapped.
Infinite Jest is hard to read. It's hard because participating in our own salvation is hard. The book invites - demands - effort. It lures us in with it’s Sierpinski-gasket structure and then wraps around on itself in annular fashion, until we, the reader, become part of the story. We're encouraged to invest emotional attention and to extend empathy to what, at first, appears to be figurants. But by doing so we realize that we are all figurants in someone else's story. And that knowledge makes us all the same. And with that sameness we begin to know ourselves.
Knowing what it is to be a human being is hard-earned: it isn’t something that’s passively handed to us in a pill. Wallace couldn’t write a book about getting active and warning of the dangers of giving our lives away to The Entertainment if we could just sit passively and absorb his narrative without engaging, just as Gately couldn't take a shot of Demerol in the hospital to temporarily ease his pain. If he had, he would've been right back where he was in the Year of the Whopper, at the beginning of the annular Subsidized Time cycle, having gained nothing from his experiences and the Infinite Jest would simply repeat. Only by fighting to stay authentic to Himself could he finally awaken to his True birth of consciousness and be able to lead others through that gateway, truly knowing what it means to be reborn, remembering precisely when it happened - as he lie flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.
- Aaron Buchwald