Waiting for the Sea Monkeys to Hatch: Slammed By Infinite Jest

My outlook has changed since I read these words back in September. Okay. That's not entirely true. My outlook - as in my general response the world coming at me - is still pretty much the same.

everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

I am relieved to say that in just a few short months, I'm more able to adjust my response. Not always. It should come as no surprise that it's infinitely easier to adjust your response to situations that mostly involve the people you don't know, than it is to adjust to those situations that seem to repeat themselves involving the people closest to you. But I can now see the possibility of how that might happen. I can also see how I might adjust my reactions to my own internal pressure (I think I was getting at that here). But I can assure you, at this point, I've had very little success. Like the saying goes, you can never know your own tao, and so it is also true that it is difficult to get away from yourself. The external world creates that illusion. Like you can watch tv, movies, read, take drugs or whatever, but there's always the ultimate realization that there is no escape. You only think you've been taken outside of yourself.

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

I suppose that's what I love about art. Because of all the things I could look at, it comes the closest to getting me outside of myself or at least in a position where I can look in on myself and the world through the filter of art.

you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

And it's easier to drive in traffic and hang out at the grocery store. In fact, adjusting my reaction to the grocery store has allowed me to actually engage with the people there in a fairly reasonable way and in turn, they've started responding to me. I can count on at least having an entertaining conversation at the store. But now the problem has migrated. To the making of the meal itself. It's like one of those slippery balloons that turns in on itself, where no matter how you grab it, it jumps out of your hands.