How to Save All the Lonely People

Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, in which writers reflect on a piece or conversation from history that all of us should commit to heart. This week, Ted Gioia reflects on the remarkable prescience of David Foster Wallace, who understood even in 1996 how technology would create a generation wracked by loneliness.

It was 1996, and Rolling Stone magazine had not published a profile of a young writer in more than 10 years. Literature was too boring for them. But journalist David Lipsky somehow persuaded his editor to send him on a book publicity tour with rising literary star David Foster Wallace.

But there was a catch. The folks at Rolling Stone were convinced that Wallace was a heroin addict—and that this would be the exciting hook in the story. So throughout the tour, Lipsky kept prodding Wallace to talk about addiction and illegal drugs. Wallace, in turn, tried to avoid the conversation.

Eventually, Wallace denied being a heroin addict and said to Lipsky: “My primary addiction in my entire life has been to television. . . . That’s of far less interest to readers than the idea of heroin.”

Indeed, Rolling Stone swiftly lost interest in the story. Nobody cared about screen addiction back in 1996. The editors wanted something grittier and edgier. So they shelved the project.

But it came back to life after Wallace’s suicide in 2008. Lipsky turned his interview tapes with Wallace into a book, and the book got made into a 2015 film, The End of the Tour—in which many quotes from the original interview appear almost verbatim.

For instance, here is the riveting scene where Wallace, played by Jason Segel, says he’s addicted to television:

This film arrived on screens at the same moment when smartphone sales were taking off. Screen addiction, it turned out, would become far more widespread than heroin addiction—and more profitable for the purveyors. No drug cartel makes as much money as the screen and app companies. It’s not even close.

So, this is a good time to revisit what Wallace tried to warn us about 30 years ago—in that interview with Lipsky, and most tellingly in his huge novel, Infinite Jest. The book’s title refers to a film that is so addictive that people who watch it can’t stop. They literally watch it to death. It’s an infinite diversion, much like the endless scrolls on today’s social media apps.

Wallace was ahead of his time in the worst possible way, experiencing firsthand all the debilitating symptoms that now plague millions. That’s why his writings feel so eerily contemporary. They read like commentaries on what’s happening right now.

We ignore his warnings at great risk.

The first of the warnings, mentioned in almost all of his interviews, was that screen technology will cause a crisis of loneliness, especially among young people. It was a looming crisis, he insisted. But he was one of the first to link this crisis to the ways we divert ourselves via screens.

As Wallace told Lipsky, Infinite Jest was “about loneliness.” He added:

“If there is sort of a sadness for people—I don’t know what, under 45 or something?—it has to do with pleasure and achievement and entertainment. And a kind of emptiness at the heart of what they thought was going on.”

They thought they were pursuing an innocent distraction. Or maybe they even believed that the screen interactions made them more connected with the world. But the actual effect was isolation.

In a 1996 interview, Wallace called loneliness a “stomach-level sadness” and a “kind of lostness.” This feeling has societal consequences. As each person falls into an isolated relationship with a screen, Wallace anticipated, larger communities begin to fray. 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.”

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 explained to Lipsky in 1996. He went so far as to describe this as “sinister,” leading us to stare at screens for hours every day without stopping to ask about the driving purpose behind the entertainment.

Screen media providers will never tell you the truth about the screens themselves. These interfaces appear—falsely!—as innocent and without agenda. But it’s no coincidence that the richest people on the planet are the ones who control our screens. They, as Wallace told literary critic Larry McCaffery in 1993, are “trying to lock us tighter into certain conventions, in this case habits of consumption.” They have a corporate agenda to monetize us.

Because of all this, Wallace said, our survival will depend on our ability to remain independent of these forces. If we abandon ourselves completely to the tech (as many now do), we become pawns in the corporate agenda—at a tremendous cost.

Wallace told Lipsky—and this is worth remembering:

At a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money.

I remind you, again, that Wallace said this back in 1996. He had no experience with the internet or social media. But his sense of their future impact is uncanny. As he predicted, the problem has only metastasized since then—because the technology has gotten much better at control and manipulation.

Then he continues:

Each generation has different things that force the generation to grow up. Maybe for our grandparents it was World War II. You know? For us . . . we’re either gonna have to put away childish things or discipline ourselves about how much time do I spend being passively entertained?

Then he adds: “If we don’t do that, then (a) as individuals, we’re gonna die, and (b) the culture’s gonna grind to a halt.”

We already see signs of both his gloomy predictions coming true. The statistics tell us that there are more lonely people now than ever before.

What can we do to help? For a start, we can talk more openly about these things. Wallace constantly made pleas for more kindness. He knew that was unfashionable in postmodern literary circles, but he didn’t care. He thought that part of the solution was a willingness to appear unfashionable—that’s why he was so willing to share his own vulnerabilities and weaknesses in interviews.

He writes in Infinite Jest: “It takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.” But this nurtures compassion in a way that cynicism and irony never do.

After all, we are all weak—just in different ways and degrees.

Wallace wrote his big books with the hope that they would help us find a way back to a more caring and connected world—but connected via people, not screens. “I think what I would like my stuff to do is make people less lonely,” he said in a 1993 interview.

Fiction, he believed, could do this in a way no TV or screen entertainment could match, because it reaches into the inner lives of the characters. He embraced this as a core mission as a storyteller. That’s why, when asked about the goal of his vocation, he said something very unhip: “It’s got something to do with love.”

Can art really help all the lonely people? Wallace believed so, and focused his life’s work on doing just that. It’s a shame that his life was so short.

Things Worth Remembering will be back in your inbox next Sunday. In case you missed it, last week, days after the release of Taylor Swift’s new album, Hadley Freeman reflected on the greatest song Swift has ever written.

This piece was originally published in The Honest Broker.

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