Suicide isn't just a mental health problem. It's a philosophical problem.

A couple of times in the history of this blog, I've had a reader reach out to me because they were concerned about me. Concerned, that is, as in they were afraid I was thinking of ending my life, of "dying by suicide," as we now say, because to say one "commits" suicide is to imply one has done something criminal. Criminals "commit" acts, we feel, whereas suicide is carried out by people with mental health issues. We want to distinguish sickness from evil. We are a more understanding people than we once were. 

My friends and other readers of this blog can be forgiven for their concern, although I wasn't really at any time seriously pondering suicide, at least not in an "I have a plan" way. I do talk about it every now and again, both on this blog and elsewhere. The reason it shows up on this blog is that writing is one of the reasons I have to go on living. It's not the only one, but it's an important one, and when I don't seem to be getting anywhere with writing, that removes one of the pillars of my "I want to live" building. This blog might be at times boring, self-indulgent, and unoriginal, but I've made a decision that at the very least it's going to be honest, as honest as I'm capable of being. That means not shirking from admitting that at times, setbacks of various sorts nudge me in the direction of thinking the struggle to find some meaning in it all isn't worth the effort. 

The most recent time a reader did a check-in on me was in September, after my "I don't think it's ever going to happen" post. It wasn't the only time, though. And this blog isn't the only occasion someone has had to wonder about me. In the Marine Corps, there was a suicide on base at one point, and everyone took the opportunity to talk to their charges about suicide. Most people assured their NCOs and officers that everything was fine and that they never considered suicide. I don't remember how the subject was presented to me, but at one point, someone said that anyone who even thought of suicide was weak. I gave the response that "I think about suicide every day." Unsurprisingly, I ended up in a counseling session with a bewildered second lieutenant who didn't know what to do with me. 

It's not as simple as saying "I'm thinking of killing myself"

Of course she was confounded by me. Given all the suicide awareness training the military has to do, she and everyone else was keenly aware that they were supposed to do something, but when she sat me down and talked to me more deeply, she wasn't sure what that something was. 

Lieutenant: I heard you said you think about suicide every day.

Sergeant Weber: That's true.

Lt: Are you thinking of killing yourself right now?

Sgt W: No, not particularly. I'm about to finally get out of the Marine Corps, so if there were ever a time I was going to, it probably wouldn't be now.

Lt: But you said you think about suicide every day.

Sgt W: That's true. 

Lt: But you're not thinking about it right now.

Sgt W: No, I am thinking of it right now.

Lt: But you just said you weren't thinking of killing yourself.

Sgt W: That's true. 

Lt: But how can both of those things be true?

Sgt W: I think about suicide every day. I think about whether life is worth living every day. I think about what reason I can give for why I don't end it all every day. I think about if it's possible life has any meaning, and if it doesn't why it's better to live than to die. But I don't specifically think actively about killing myself. Not every day, anyhow. And not today.

Suicide should be an acceptable topic of discussion 

That's the gist of what was said in that conversation, although I've made my part in it clearer than I'm sure I stated it then. There were probably also occasional "ma'ams" thrown in here and there on my part to show the required deference. 

The point I was trying to make is that it's possible to consider suicide in a philosophical way, one that includes me but isn't specifically about me, without necessarily being suicidal. I felt--and still feel--that one can consider suicide the way one considers a timeshare: Is this right for me? If not now, might it be right for me later? Anything else felt to me like an a priori judgment, and a priori judgments have never sat well with me. They tend to come--with exceptions--from people who are neither reflective nor thoughtful, the type of people whose opinions about religion and politics have not changed since late adolescence. 

My personal back-and-forth on the subject...it's pretty much Hamlet

Other than the seven years when I was an evangelical Christian, which provided an a priori reason not to "die by suicide," I've had something of of ongoing debate in my head about it. On the one hand, life seems to mostly consist, time-wise, of doing things I'd rather not be doing: work, maintenance of my belongings and my person, financial planning, paying bills, shopping, preparing food or cleaning up after having made it. It includes spending time and effort to master skills I have no interest in, like personal finance or how to spool a weed trimmer. Now that I'm older, that list includes visits to medical professionals. As I get older still, it's going to include a lot more of that. Life is mostly a shabby affair in which people scrabble to improve their lot by small degrees. We spend all of this time doing things we don't want to do in order to squeeze in the few things we actually enjoy, but in the end, life seems, by all the available evidence, to be a meaningless bother. Few of us achieve the dreams we want in life, and even if we do, we die anyway, and our achievements seldom survive a few years after we are gone. Given that, aren't most people making themselves suffer needlessly, all the while surviving on a thin, self-delusional hope?

On the other hand, though, the words of Gandalf often come to me when I start to think like this: "Despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt." Yes, life seems shabby and seedy and pointless, but do I know for sure that it is? And if I'm not sure, isn't it unwise to make a decision that can't be undone? Uncertainty as a reason to forego suicide, if not outright condemn it, isn't a new idea with me, of course. In the most famous words in the world on suicide (indeed, perhaps the most famous words in the world, period), Hamlet cited uncertainty as the thing that kept him enduring the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,

The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurns

That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pith and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry

And lose the name of action.

Of course, it's one thing to decide not to kill yourself, and another entirely to endeavor to live happily and fully. "Life seems like a piece of shit, but there's a tiny sliver of a chance I'm wrong" might keep someone from ending their life, at least for a while, but it's hardly enough to make anyone bear fardels with a willing heart. It's not enough to inspire anyone to live selflessly or to strive for greatness or to do much except strive to maximize pleasure at all times. (This is what many Americans do, which leads me to believe that, whatever they may say, many Americans are, at heart, nihilists.) 

Yet, I do try to live a life of some value to others, or at least a life I judge has value. I don't call myself a nihilist, although my best guess is that either nobody is running the universe or the universe is run by a lunatic. So why do I bother to try? 

My best answer to this is something of a modified version of the point of Albert Camus' 1942 essay "The Myth of Sisyphus." I read this essay for the first time soon after I had stopped being a Christian. As one friend noted back then, even after I'd left Christianity, the Christians still had their hooks pretty deep into me, because I still sort of accepted their assertion that without God, nothing means anything. I'm still not sure I've ever abandoned this idea, but at least Camus' essay offered a third option, when considering the absurdity of the universe, between escaping it through belief in God and suicide. 

I don't exactly follow his ideal, but I drew this much out of it: I should live selflessly and nobly not because God wants me to, but because the universe is a cruel place that places people who long for nobility and kindness in a world inimical to these things, and so fuck you, universe. I act like life has meaning not because I am deluded enough to think it really does, but because I long for meaning, and so to act like what I do matters is a means of fulfilling my sense of anger that the universe isn't what I wish it were. I strive for connection and to help others precisely because the universe places me in an eternal conundrum of wishing for true connection and community while at the same time making those things impossible. I strive to act like what I do matters precisely because it doesn't, and that makes me angry. I love partly out of rage. I love and care and generally try at life as an act of defiance. 

A digression not strictly necessary

I know a lot of people who don't believe in any type of religion or fixed ideology, but who claim their happiness in life stems from something called "cheerful nihilism" or "optimistic nihilism" or something like that. You can find a lot of good essays or videos online by Googling cheerful nihilism, but here, I'll just say that the short version can be found in Monty Python's closing song from the movie Life of Brian, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." 

I know some people draw real consolation from the notion that if nothing means anything, that means we're as free to be happy as we are to be despondent, but this seems to me to be exactly the kind of "philosophy" Leonato spoke of in Much Ado About Nothing when he said there was "never yet philosopher that could bear the toothache patiently." Cheerful nihilism seems to belong to the wealthy western world, to people who generally are well fed, well liquored, and have enough hedonistic gratification to forget, temporarily, about the absurdity of existence. But actually crucify those same people, and not in the highly sanitized and comic way Life of Brian does, and see how long their nihilism remains cheerful.

Cheerful nihilism comes off to me as nothing more than the agnostic's version of Pascal's wager. In this case, instead of saying that you don't gain anything from not believing in God and might gain a lot from believing, it's saying that given the absence of God or some other ultimate meaning in the universe, you can either be happy about that or sad, and so you might as well be happy, because it doesn't help anything to be sad. I feel this has similar faults to the actual Pascal's wager argument. For the original argument, I've always felt that it doesn't matter if I can see that it's a good bargain to believe in God, because if I know I actually don't believe, then I can't make myself believe because I think it might make me feel better. Similarly, for cheerful nihilism, I can't force myself to adopt a sanguine attitude about the absurd just because it might make my time in the absurd less painful. 

In short, I don't follow cheerful nihilism, but angry nihilism, and part of that anger is to deny letting myself act like an actual nihilist. Of course, rage is only useful as long as you can keep yourself angry. The older I get, the more the fire goes out of me. It's not that I think the universe isn't a shitty deal as much as I ever did; it's just that I can't keep working myself into a fit as much as I used to. It ain't a perfect system, but it's the only system I've got. 

But my personal response to the problem of suicide isn't the point of this post

You can agree, disagree, or be indifferent to my own personal resolution of the suicide question. My point isn't that I have the right solution, but that suicide is actually a real question the absurdity of the universe places on each of us. That means that each of us has to deal with it like a real question, and if it's a real question, then it's possible the answer might be that suicide makes sense. If we enter the debate with an answer already in mind, we haven't thought about it honestly. 

If you listen to mental health professionals, though--and this is the real point of this post--to merely ask the question in an open way already means you have a problem. Because to health professionals, suicide is always the result of a mental health condition. They can't look at it any other way, because mental health care professionals enter the discussion with the strongest of a priori commitments. Their professional ethics require them to assume that suicide is always the wrong decision, no matter what the circumstances of the person in question may be. Furthermore, because suicide is always the wrong decision, it follows that only people with mental health conditions would opt for it. 

One can see this in the way suicide prevention training is carried out in large organizations. Many people--well meaning people, many of whom have been personally affected by the suicide of a loved on, and against whom I mean no disrespect--urge us to "look for the signs" and to always be checking on those around us. Whenever I read the proclamations of a suicide awareness campaign, I think about how such a campaign would have sounded like to ancient practitioners of seppuku. Or, for that matter, how it would have sounded to Shakespeare when he was writing one of his many, many meditations on the subject in different plays. You don't have to agree with how past societies have viewed suicide, but you do have to at least acknowledge that societal views on suicide have a long history, and that this history includes a lot of views that are far from our view that suicide is always a tragedy and always to be avoided at all costs. 

I don't have any problem with mental health professionals. Many people I know have used their services and felt themselves helped thereby. Some claim mental health services have saved their lives. I don't doubt that's true. However, I do think that on the subject of suicide, mental health professionals might tend to think they have the final and most authoritative word, when in fact, for someone like me, they might have nothing to say that's of any particular interest to me. To be helped by mental health services, one has to first buy into the notion that life is worth living. If you don't accept that, there's not much they can do for you, unless one counts putting chemicals in you that convince your brain you think life is worth living. Therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists can do a lot to help you cope with struggles in life, but as for believing that struggles in life are worth overcoming, they don't have anything to say, qua their profession, that's any more insightful or authoritative than anyone else. 

Because so many modern writers seem to have used therapy, the language of therapy has entered into the discourse on suicide and the absurd in literature, an intrusion I somewhat resent. For centuries, the central issue in English literature was man's striving with a universe that was either indifferent to or antithetical to human desires. The paradox of humanity both fearing and longing for death was everywhere. At least, in any literature I find worth reading. My views on this subject are influenced by Shakespeare, by Moby Dick, by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, by Milton's Paradise Lost, and by countless other works in which much of the external conflict is a result of an internal conflict against a fate or a creator that has let down its creation. Hell, if you read the Bible in a non-pious way, you'll quickly see that it's as full of humans complaining about their creator at least as much as they are praising him. 

This focus on humanity set adrift in a sea of the absurd peaked after World War Two, when it became impossible to ignore the fact that humans are without adult supervision, and that if allowed to, the strong will annihilate the weak. But the last twenty to thirty years have seen a turn away from this focus. It's almost as if, after acknowledging the unspeakable heart of darkness of the universe for so long, the human race has collectively given up and decided it's better not to worry about such matters. We haven't so much decided that the universe isn't absurd as we have decided to make a big joke out of the fact that it is. So life is pointless, big deal. Enjoy your streaming videos and your meal delivery service. Go to therapy and take drugs if you need to. It won't make the universe any different, but it'll change how you feel about it. The cultural artifacts of such are society are shows like Ted Lasso, which narrows the failings of the cosmic father down to the banal, forgivable weaknesses of the terrestrial father, and then tells us that a good enough therapist can fix that. Of course we don't say "commit" suicide anymore; our society isn't serious enough to commit to anything.  

To the extent there is still a struggle and a will to rebel in literature, it's mostly of a purely secular and political nature, not a cosmic and existential rebellion. The antidote to suicide isn't coming to hard-won terms with the absurd, it's a bigger social safety net to ensure mental health services for everyone. We rebel against the political opinion we disagree with, not the fate which presents politics with problems to solve in the first place. 

Thinking about suicide on my terms and making room for the terms others need

It may seem like I'm disparaging mental health services, but I'm not. Although I don't think the mental health profession can tell me why I ought to strive to work through the absurd, only give me practical tips to cope with its more obnoxious aspects, that's still a considerable contribution. More importantly, I do think that of the people who actually do die by suicide, the vast majority probably really suffer from some diagnosed or diagnosable mental health malady. As much as I am arguing here for space to weigh suicide as a neutral decision without automatically being lumped into mental health discussions, I doubt if many people argue themselves philosophically into killing themselves. Usually, there is actual suffering, rather than abstract suffering, involved in a suicide, and the worst of that suffering tends to happen between the ears, rather than elsewhere in the body. 

I was reminded of this recently when a friend sent me a couple of messages that sounded desperate. I was gone for the weekend when she sent them, which means I didn't see them until a few days after they'd been sent. (I keep social media off my phone.) The messages were urgent pleas for encouragement. This isn't a normal thing from her, and the fact that I hadn't answered her messages for a few days made me nervous. My friend has told me before about her mental health struggles, which are mild but still a thing. I regard it as a very special trust that she has shared this with me, but I felt like I had failed that trust by not being there when she asked for something. When I finally did respond, she didn't answer right away, which made me feel more worried. It wasn't just general concern, although there was plenty of that. There was also a specific feeling of responsibility. She occasionally reads this blog, and I'm sure at some point, we must have talked about my thoughts on suicide. What if my casual talk about suicide had had some influence on a person who didn't really need my influence? 

Later, I realized she was fine and that my concern about my influence on her was misplaced. My concern about influencing anyone is probably misplaced; that's one of the reasons I feel so dispirited about my progress as a writer. But in this case, my lack of influence was probably a good thing. 

Mental health professionals tend to get anxious whenever anyone except a mental health professional talks about suicide publicly. When there is a suicide in a school, they mobilize to stem the tide, because suicides can be contagious. When Robin Williams died by suicide, they scolded those who shared a "Be free, Genie" meme because it violated the standards for how we should talk about suicide. In general, there is a censorship of suicide like scarcely any topic. It might be easier to find pornography on the Internet than it is to find real information about suicide. I've been afraid to Google on it for years, because Google immediately freaks out and tries to get anyone who puts certain phrases in to call helplines and go to the hospital. 

To someone like me, who is fascinated by suicide and whether it's a good solution to the problem the absurdity of life presents us with, I've always found it interesting that we have to take such care to prevent copycat suicides. To me, that suggests that a lot of people are always thinking about it, although we are shushed and shamed when we speak those thoughts out loud, even more than for other subjects we are told to eschew in polite society. Which leads me to conclude that I'm right to suspect that suicide has always been a just-barely unspoken thought on the minds of most of humanity for as long as humans have been around. 

So how do I balance my responsibility to not trigger those with genuine mental health concerns with my own need to talk about suicide without judgment? While I may not be giving out practical advice on how to kill oneself, like one website parents are trying to get taken down, I should also consider my words as if my own son were reading them. (I've always been careful to avoid talking about suicide around my son, but I've noticed, as he gets further into his teen years, that he's a lot like me. I think he's going to get there quite on his own, and when he does, I hope he doesn't read the wrong thing or watch the wrong video before he has a chance to grow up a bit more and balance more ideas against each other.) 

There are two things I believe about suicide that mental health professionals would object to. First is that suicide is not automatic evidence of a mental health condition. Given that this is a world in which genocide can happen and no cosmic adult intervenes, I believe it is quite possible for a sane person to conclude that checking out is the best option. At the very least, it's not an insane choice. Secondly, I think that it's important to consider suicide as a real option without judgment, and that if and only if you do that, are you truly choosing to live. Early in Camus' essay, he posits that most people do not end their own lives because of a conscious choice, but the absence of one: "You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit." I believe it's important to truly choose to live, which means first to think about negating life. 

I might say that my own willingness to think so much about suicide might have saved me from it so far. One conclusion I've reached from thinking about it nearly every day is that it's something I can always put off until tomorrow. By procrastinating in this manner, I've managed to live until nearly fifty, long enough at least, that if I died tomorrow, it would be sad but by no means the greatest of tragedies. And I still have a number of reasons to go on for at least a while longer: a desire not to die before my parents, because as a parent, I know what that would feel like; a feeling that I have to continue to model perseverance and resilience to my children; the knowledge that I do not yet "see the end beyond all doubt." 

I don't know if I will continue to procrastinate forever, though. Maybe when I am very old and looking a nursing home in the eyes, facing a future of consuming more and more drugs and medical plastics and other consumables to stay alive without being able to contribute to society in return or even much enjoy the life I still have, I will finally decide the balance has shifted. Or, maybe, I'll find that I'm so terrified of death I want to run from it until I absolutely cannot run anymore. I don't know. I know I'm not made of tough enough stuff to perform something like seppuku. I can't take pain, which is one of the reasons I have not yet truly thought too seriously about suicide. All the options sound like they hurt a lot. So might as well keep putting it off, just like I will probably keep putting off the colonoscopy my health provider now wants me to go get. 

While I think it's important to confront humanity's innate and complex longing for death head-on, I think that at the very least, for the time being, I will avoid casual mentions of the subject when I write. A piece like this one where I am dealing with the subject in sufficient complexity is one thing, but brief and unexplained references are probably irresponsible. While I don't think therapists or psychiatrists really have the answers to the questions I pose any more than auto mechanics or insurance claims representatives do, all of these people can be very useful when you need one, and I have no desire to interfere with the practical help they are trying to provide. 

In closing, I want to make clear, if this post hasn't already done it, that this isn't a cry for help. I'm as close to happy right now as I get. It was a year of a lot of changes for me, changes that ended up being a lot more difficult than I anticipated, but I rode them out, and now maybe the worst is behind me. I probably won't ever find meaning through writing in the way I hoped for, but there are other avenues of meaning still open to me. This post isn't about me being at the end of my rope. It's about how I've tried for over thirty years to find a way to keep climbing. 

Since I've just spent five weeks deeply mired in reading David Foster Wallace, let's go ahead and talk openly about suicide

Thanks to a three-day weekend in which I ignored my family and friends almost completely, I finished Wallace's Infinite Jest. I got through the last pages this morning right after seeing my son off to school, then had to get through a day of work with that heaviness on the brain.

I'm going to attempt some kind of cathartic post on what the big ideas in the book are so I can move on with my life and do something else. I intend--unwisely, in all likelihood--to do this without a net. That is, I'm going to try to come up with my take on the book without referring to what the many, many experts and fans of the book have already said about it. I don't want to do either an academic-style analysis or a New York Times-type critique. The book's great. We all know that. It's also been studied to death, so if I'm going to say anything even close to new about it, it's going to have to be more personal.

This post is about suicide, about my relationship to the topic, about a book that deals extensively with it, written by an author who ultimately committed it.

Suicide in Infinite Jest 

Suicide is all over IJ. The meaning of the title within the novel refers to a movie about a woman who seems to softly promise the release of death. The movie has become weaponzied because people who watch it become essentially lobotomized, unable from their first viewing to desire anything but to watch it again. Beyond that, the book spends roughly half its pages on the down-and-out, the addicts and recovering addicts of Boston. This is a population that includes some who are tormented by the shadow of the black wing of aggressive depression. (If aggressive depression is anything like it is described in this book, let me say I feel nothing but sympathy for those who suffer from it, and I do not in the least bit begrudge anyone wanting out.)

But the link to suicide goes deeper still. It isn't just an option for the mentally ill. The book is, as the title suggests, deeply indebted to Hamlet, a play we teach to moody teens every year for some reason even though suicide is all over the play. Of course, there is the "To Be or Not To Be" soliloquy, which is an extended meditation on suicide. It's an option that Hamlet eventually only weakly opts out of because he is concerned about what kinds of dreams may torment him in that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler has returned. There is also Hamlet's even more direct wish that "the Almighty had not fix'd his canon 'gainst self-slaughter."

Hamlet's reasons for considering suicide in many ways contradict those given in IJ. The shifting narrator of IJ at one point notes that generally, people do not seriously consider suicide because they decide that "life's assets and debits do not square." But that seems to be exactly what has led Hamlet to consider it. He is disillusioned (but not, I think, depressed) that life seems to have moved on after his father's death so quickly. If his father can be forgotten like that, what is the point of life, if it's so fleeting? Why would anyone put up with the million annoyances, big and small, just to endure to the end of a thing that means nothing?

Perhaps this isn't the kind of suicidal thinking, though, that brings action. It's not enough to override the animal impulse, the instinct to survive. Hamlet may deride himself outright for being a coward, but that's not enough to make him do what he thinks he ought to do and end his own life. His abstractions do not bring action.

And that's a key theme of IJ. Intellectuals are capable of seeing through the many holes in the answers proposed by others of how to make life meaningful and worth living. But they are only able to show the holes, not to propose something better. They're just smart enough to be miserable.  It's a theme Jonathan Franzen has picked up in his work.

Geoffery Day is one of these just-smart-enough-to-be-miserable characters. He has come into Ennet House, a halfway house for those recovering from addiction, but just can't abide the cliches that AA wants him to repeat. Don Gately, although stunned nearly to silence by Day's verbal wit, manages to make one thing clear: Geoffery is completely right that everything AA tells you is garbage, but it is also completely right that if you do what AA wants you to do, it will work. It's a complete paradox (although Don wouldn't call it that), but it's true. But Day is too smart to unlock the magic.

The Antidote to suicidal tendencies in IJ

There are a couple of classes of people who might consider suicide. There are those tormented by psychological maladies or addictions that make life so painful they override the will to survive. These kinds of motivations lead to action. IJ compares these feelings to those who are so afraid of dying in a fire they jump from a burning building, preferring the certain death of the fall to what so terrifies them. People in really awful depression are in pain, pain that's greater than their fear.

There are also those whose problem with life is more a philosophical one. Hal, the novel's rather obvious teenage simulacra of Hamlet ("Prince Hal," a janitor calls him, rather too pointedly), is one of these. He is gobsmacked one morning when he imagines a pile of all the food he will eat from that morning to the end of his life, then pictures next to it a pile of all the shits he will have to take when he eats all that food. It gives him the screaming fantods, and it's all too much to take in. He spends the rest of his few moments on stage lying down, watching his father's movies. We are left to wonder if his coming seeming madness, alluded to in the chapter's opening scene, one in which every facial expression and word he says is misunderstood, is real madness.

Both those suffering direct psychological torment and the less direct, existential kind are offered options. For the recovering alcoholic, drug addict, or depressive, there is the magical compartmentalizing cliche of AA: one day at a time. Build a wall around the day, don't see beyond it. Build it over each second of the day if you have to. Yes, it's a cliche, but cliches tend to become cliches for a reason. You cannot eat that entire pile of meat or defecate all of that shit. As Joelle van Dyne discovers, if you try to think of all the days in front of you, they will feel like they are too big a hurdle, like each day is a car you have to jump on a motorcycle, Evil Kenevil-style. But a series of jumps over one car, repeated each day, is possible.

For those who have talked themselves into an intellectual state of uncertainty, until they feel that all the uses of this world are dull, stale, flat and unprofitable--maybe not actively considering suicide, because their thoughts cannot ever obtain the name of action, but nonetheless supremely indifferent to life--for these, the options are maybe a bit more complicated. The magic of cliches might not be available to them. So what do they turn to?

One thing they shouldn't turn to, according it IJ, is a sense of world-weary, ultra-cool ennui or weltschmerz. IJ constantly reinforces for us the idea that the never-ending cycle of smart-ass American irony is not, as we tend to believe, proof that we are wise to our own foibles; it's the cause of many of our most profound social anxieties and pathologies. It's natural to yearn for earnestness. (Here, I will cheat and bring in a video that explains Wallace's thoughts on Irony, one I was aware of before reading the book):

Early on in the book, we read a paper Hal has written for school on how America's police hero evolved from Hawaii Five-O to Hill Street Blues. It went from the man of action, who moved endlessly toward a conclusion we all saw was right, to post-modern hero Frank Furillo, a man struggling to figure out his murky way in a complex bureaucratic landscape. Furillo is not a hero of action, but re-action. Hal wonders if the future of the hero will give us a hero of "non-action, the catatonic hero, the one beyond calm, divorced from all stimulus..." By the end of the novel, Hal is on his way to being this very thing.

The last remaining vestige of the hero of action the novel sees as possible is Hal's brother Mario, a strange mix of birth defects and Yoda-like wisdom. In a touching (i.e. schmaltzy and utterly un-ironic) scene, the trainer who comes to the tennis academy where Hal and Mario live was moved to come there when he (the trainer) was conducting a social experiment living as a homeless person. Instead of asking for money, he asked for someone to just touch him. He held out his dirty hand and asked for human contact. When nobody did this for weeks, he (the trainer) began to despair, and almost forgot his real identity and became homeless. But Mario hears him (the trainer) asking for someone to just touch him and, unable to think it is just some weird argot for "please give me money," as everyone else has, shakes the man's hand.


But let's get real here

I haven't used scholarly sources here, because this book's been gone over by scholars and fans to death. I'm not going to produce something new through doing a lot of homework. In the spirit of Wallaceian earnestness, I'd like to talk about what this book made me feel.

This book is better than anything I could ever do. If I quit my job, abandoned my family, lived to write, I'd never touch the jaw-dropping wonder of this book. And yet, the guy who wrote it killed himself at about exactly my current age. A big part of me doesn't understand Wallace's suicide. I'm like the tennis students at Enfield Tennis Academy. I think that because he wrote a book that was ten times better than anything I've ever written, he should be ten times happier.

Of course, this is nonsense. No sooner do tennis players make the big time than they begin to worry about losing their fame and sense of being special when they stop winning. Tennis is a symbol for the American dream in IJ. Once we achieve it, our options are: enjoy it (often too much, which makes us lose our edge), or work tirelessly and paranoiacally to maintain it, which begins to feel like a grind, and leads some athletes to seek refuge in drugs, alcohol, etc.

There is retrospectively unnerving foreshadowing of Wallace's death in the book. The character in IJ who is most like its author is the film-maker, a man referred to by his family, suggestively, as "Himself." Himself "de-maps" himself by sticking his own head in a microwave.

I haven't extensively looked into Wallace's life. In grad school, I was still part of the generation that believed somewhat that details about the author's life were as likely to mislead you as enlighten. I don't believe that anymore, but I still wanted to try to connect purely with the book before I learned too much about the author. It turns out that Wallace probably killed himself more out of the psychic torment and addiction sorts of problems than the existential malaise kinds.

Thankfully, these are torments I've been spared. I'm not depressed, and I'm not within a million miles of addicted. But I have thought about suicide often since I was a teenager. I've almost always thought of suicide in terms of a cold calculus, the "credits and debits" of the novel. For now, I've put the question of suicide out of mind, because I feel--for reasons I can't quite describe--that it would be wrong to go while my parents are still alive and while I still have kids to get established in life. But man, I've seen my grandmother and my mother-in-law die in nursing homes in the last ten years. I do not want to go that way, surrounded by the eye-burning ammonia stink of urine until I don't notice it anymore.

I don't want to go too early, but when the time comes, I don't want to lose the name of action and go too late. I'm worried I won't have the stamina to put up with life until I've made it long enough, but I'm also worried that when I've made it as far as I want to make it, I'll be too scared to give it up. It's a difficult balance I want to achieve between clinging to life and being ready to leave it. The thing about Infinite Jest is this: I don't think IJ goes far enough to make a convincing case for sticking around.

Instead of tennis, life just seems to me like a kind of semi-interesting board game, but one that goes on way too long, well past the point of being amusing. I have no real grudge against others if they enjoy the game, and in fact wouldn't mind making room for them at the table by bowing out myself, if it weren't for the fact I think it would hurt the chances of others I feel responsible for helping to enjoy the game themselves. So I keep playing well past the point of diminishing returns for me, until life just seems like a big pile of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrows I have to endure.

I know it's an ad hominem to say that what DFW offers in IJ must not be a good method for getting myself as far in the game as I want to go, since it didn't work for him. But doesn't that mean something? Doesn't it suggest something about the usefulness of the solutions offered in IJ for finding a way to keep getting up every morning without de-mapping oneself?

It seems absurd to say Wallace underestimated the role humor can play in survival, because I can't remember reading a funnier author. But in taking irony out of play, DFW is really taking a major weapon in the humorist's arsenal, one that can help to cope with life. Sometimes, irony is better than earnestness. Not always. I'm glad DFW made an earnest plea for earnestness, and that it seems to have had an impact on our culture. But sometimes, yes, it really is better to evade your true feelings and use humor, even douchey world-weary ironic humor, than it is to come in contact with real feelings.

Me, I use some combination of fuck-you-universe rage, emotion-dodging humor, dopamine I get from occasionally being able to help others or finding something genuinely fun to do, and bits of occasional hopefulness that somewhere in the things in heaven and earth not dreamed of in my small philosophy might be something that could make this whole tale to be told by someone other than an idiot. There is no right formula. You get through life telling yourself whatever you need to tell yourself. If I tell myself enough things to get to a point where I feel pretty sure I've played long enough, I win.

I loved this book, but I'm not sure in the end it was enough of what I look for that I'm going to keep going back to it. I don't think I'll be one of those annoying DFW acolytes I've read about, sort of the literary equivalent of the worst of the Rick and Morty fanbase. Maybe that's for the best, since those kinds of fans seem to lead to the kinds of snarky, ironic critiques of themselves that DFW would have hated.

In the meantime, should the wraith of Wallace ever feel the desire to slow down enough to sit atop my monitor and share its thoughts with me, he's always welcome at my desk. I hope his wraith is happy wherever he is. 

Shakespeare and soft suicidality: A Thanksgiving meditation

Ask any lay person to recite a Shakespearean soliloquy, and I'd wager eight out of ten people would start with "To be or not to be." That speech is to Shakespearean literature what the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth are to classical music. It's strange, perhaps, that one of the best known and most cherished passages in the English language is an extended meditation on suicide, one that takes a fairly agnostic position on the subject--it'd be nice to try, but the risks seem kind of high. Personally, there are only three Shakespeare passages I can quote more than a few lines of without looking at the script: 1) To be or not to be; 2) "Out, out brief candle," from Macbeth; and 3) The "seven ages of man," from As You Like it.

Curiosity about death and suicide pervades the first of these three soliloquies; the second one from Macbeth is imbued with a nihilism that welcomes a coming death. The third, after a number of comical references, ends with terrible force by describing the end of human existence: "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans...everything."

Shakespeare scholars warn us not to read any character's words as the real thoughts of Shakespeare. The term "negative capability" comes from Keats' reading of Shakespeare. It means, among other things, Shakespeare's ability to lose himself in his characters, so it's impossible to tell where the author's real sympathies lie. But even if those passages in Shakespeare that talk about suicide or question the meaning of life aren't meant to be met with full acceptance, it's hard to deny that these passages are among the ones that hit us in the face the hardest when reading Shakespeare. They're the ones that knock us down with their truth. When people comment today with amazement at how someone writing more than 400 years ago understood people so well, I imagine they are thinking of passages like this.

"Soft suicidality"; How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world.

I'm not suicidal. (Really, Karen--you don't have to worry!) I just don't enjoy life that much, and often find it nearly beyond my ability to manage, in spite of my good fortune. I realize I have it very, very good compared to most humans born into the world today and throughout history. I ought to be enjoying myself more. It's an affront, perhaps, to the fates to not enjoy my good fortune more than I do. If it makes you feel any better, my own guilt about the fact that I don't enjoy my good fortune more is itself one of the things that robs me of my joy. But I think life ought to offer more than just relative gratefulness, more than simply realizing that I'm not a sex slave or a Murle child in South Sudan or a North Korean prisoner of conscience. Life ought to be something to be grateful for in absolute terms.



My good fortune does not mean the world is good

I know better than anyone the good hand I was dealt. I have great parents. I have a really nice family. Everyone around me, outside the province of Mrs. Heretic's teeth, has wonderful health. I'm in the upper-middle-class in income, even if I manage to find new and inventive ways to squander that income.

And just because I haven't faced the worst this world has to offer doesn't mean I don't understand how horrible it can be and the fate I've been lucky to avoid. I have what you might call a long and intimate second-hand knowledge of just how horrifying the game can get for some people.

But telling me to be thankful because the really awful things didn't happen to me personally seems like some strange cousin of Stockholm Syndrome. To whom should I be thankful? To the God/Universe/Fate that allows some children to be born into slavery but not me personally? The fact that it happens at all should make us question to goodness of things. Falling to my knees to give thanks that things aren't as bad for me personally as they could be is what happens in the Book of Job. God terrifies Job, rather than giving an answer as to why the wicked suffer, and eventually, Job is frightened into stopping his questions. Might makes right.

I'll eat your pumpkin pie, just quit telling me to be thankful

There's another element to it. Telling me that I've got it better than most people is like the teacher who calls on you to give an answer, but right before you give your answer, the teacher says, "This is an easy one." Suddenly, all your confidence melts away. You can't win now. If you get it right, it was an easy one. If you miss it, you're a total moron. This is one reason why I get so annoyed with those people in my social media who keep posting that video with the condescending description, "for the people who still don't understand white privilege." It's not that I don't understand it. It's an easy idea. And it's not that I don't think it exists. It's that it's really not a helpful idea to me. All it makes me feel like is that my life is the "easy question," and if I do well, I was supposed to, and if I mess up, I'm double the screw-up anyone else is. In this sense, my blessings are...well, not curses, but less blessed, anyhow. I hate being told my life is an easy question, because the answer sure doesn't seem to be coming easy to me. EVEN THOUGH YES, BEING WHITE, MALE, AND STRAIGHT DOES MAKE IT EASIER. It's still hard for me. Just because others are doing advanced differential calculus doesn't mean I find algebra easy.

But Thanksgiving as we tend to practice it asks us to reflect on these very advantages we privileged folk have. You might as well have a holiday called "All the Reasons you Ought to be Doing Better Than You Are Day."

Taking time to realize that we've got it pretty good--and most people in America are probably in this category--might help us to keep from catastrophizing our problems. It might be good for our mental health and happiness to some extent. Realizing that the latest unexpected expense setting me back isn't a calamity on the level of civil war or famine can help keep me from dwelling too much on it. So to the extent that "Thanksgiving" is calling for an attitude of balance, fine.

It is DEFINITELY important to say thank you to the people in our lives who make it better, both for our own good and also out of just plain politeness.

But I am tired of being told to make generalized, omni-directional thankfulness a perpetual attitude.

Life is hard. If it's not hard for you, I'd guess you don't think about it too much. Good for you. If that's true, feel free to ooze all the thankfulness you want. But the ubiquity of sentiments like those of Hamlet or Macbeth seem to me like a pretty good indication that it has always been recognized that life is a struggle, a struggle so trying it's not entirely clear that it's worth the trouble.

When I eat too much good food this year, surrounded by the people who keep me on the affirmative side of life being just good enough to keep going, I'll count myself incredibly lucky. But lucky doesn't mean thankful.