What was David Foster Wallace trying to convey with Infinite Jest?

That you shouldn't have bought this book.

We're entertaining ourselves to death in order to ignore or mask our ennui. But this is merely a sublimation of an existentiell, a primal orientation toward being.

Or something like that.

>primal

primordial, obvi

Don't do drugs or you might ruin your professional sport career.

there's a word I'm looking for, where an idea or phrase gets used so much in society that regardless of actual substance it seems to just fall flat. If any anons remember that word it would be helpful.

Basically the ideas you've been bombarded with for the past 10 or so years, anti-america, anti-entertainment, so on and so forth, were presented in this book.

He talks about a lot of things in modern american society, and makes a lot of bold predictions that we've now watched unfold over the last few years (face time mask chapter -> snapchat filters, Johny Gentle -> Trump (though this was more of a commentary on Reagan))

He warned about how Americans get so addicted to damn near everything, entertainment, sports, drugs, getting addicted, beating addiction, everything.

He spoke about capitalism's growing grip on America, where everything becomes subsidized.

A lot of his quotes when looked at from our current 2016 lens come off as some bullshit you'd find on tumblr or instagram, but i think when you read the book as a whole, especially because he's a pretty good writer, you understand a lot of what he's saying a lot better. Sure there's a lot of morons out there and you can automatically assume that what they're saying is just bullshit, but hey maybe you can have the same idea as someone without a clue and its better to actually know where you stand on these things. Of course there's a lot more to read on this than just DFW; dont worship him.

Unironically that everything is unhealthy is massive doses. Drugs and commercial entertainment in IJ are metaphors for one another, and it totally works.

are you possibly thinking of semantic saturation

I'm hard too. Have fun.

>he's a pretty good writer
there's another site you belong on

It's an attack on cynicism. America (especially the "intellectual" portion) is cynical of emotion and guarded from it. People are so cynical of emotion that they hide from it without knowing what they are hiding from, and they become addicted to substances to avoid the fact that they are hiding.

The lesson is that emotion is nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to be cynical about. You can't reason it away or fight against it without disastrous results. You have to accept it with courage and work through the pain of it. You have to allow yourself to be vulnerable.

No that's more like saying one word or phrase over and over again until it doesnt really sound like a word anymore.
There's another one for when ideas/phrases become cliche over time and lose meaning because people say it so much.

devaluation?

I will sum of the entire message of the book so that you don't have to read it
>waah waah TV is bad!!!
>We are like, addicted, man!! we are like, addicts man! Just like drugs, dude! isn't that deep?
>We're also so LONELY man! so we use addictions n shit! Wait Don Delillo and a billion other people aready said this? fuck you!
>random miscellaneous facts to give off the impression of him being smart.
>be sincere! just b urself and everything will be okayy :-)!!!!

Okay you don't have to read Infinite Jest anymore.

"banal platitude" -david foster wallace

kys

>anymore

platitude! there it is

you're a special kind of autistic

thanks senpai. I was planning on reading it but it seems it's just a shitty book about Chad, by Chad for Chad.

>by Chad
"Audience pussy" doesn't mean prime Stacy when you're an author user.

It's nothing deep, but I found it very funny

a dystopia where netflix is real

He was a repressed homosexuality that he wsa struggling with

dfw=rekt

bretty much dis. he did the right thing in the end, dough.

Cynicidsm is really cool; I wish I was a cynic.