I’m not a big fan of David Foster Wallace. Sorry. He’s just the right type of neurotic I resonate with and it’s not pleasant to read him because he’s me. However, I do like some of his interviews and some of his essays. (And Hideous Men was OK; I even taught it in class in a previous life.) He is famous for his ideas about entertainment and television. Especially this interview gives us a good idea about what his thinking is about. “Too much good stuff,” that’s the problem. Maybe it is, but it’s also just the amount of stuff that is distressing. Too much stuff. Period.

I have a pathetic YouTube addiction. It’s bad, I’m 42 years old and feel pathetic because of it. I cannot overcome it with moderation, so I have to just go cold turkey now. This has worked before and will work again. That David Foster Wallace interview was the last video I’ll watch for a long, long time.

But there’s nothing better to do, really. At least not yet. There are a few projects I want to focus on, but I’m not doing this because of “productivity,” whatever that means. All this sounds passive aggressive, but I don’t mean it to sound like that. It just kind of is like that. Welcome to the internet.

I’m not going off the strong stuff to feel better. I’m not doing this to benefit anyone. I don’t want to substitute my addictions. It’s not to become a better person. Or fool myself into thinking I’m morally superior . It’s something I can’t put my finger on: it’s finger on unputtable. Maybe I will find out when I do it. Or after a little while.

Maybe AI has something to do with it? It’s been the talk of the town recently and at work as well. I remember when somebody came up with a mathematical solution to all possible Sudoku puzzles. Until then, I had been interested in doing them. I did not, but I was interested. After the math told us that all of the puzzles can be solved, I completely lost interest. I think something like that is about to happen to Internet content. Not the good stuff, but the stuff called “content.” It will explode. It has already exploded, but now that explosion will explode.

When that happens, I want to be uncomfortably close to whatever somebody is writing or playing or painting or whatever. I want hesitation and vulnerability from whatever I see and hear. Incomplete people. Broken arguments and uncertainty. People who do not know what they’re doing, really. I want to get out of my comfort zone and get you out of yours. I think David Foster Wallace wanted something like that as well.