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David Foster Wallace wrote a great book entitled The Pale King that wrestles with the boredom and frustration of our modern office-work related lives. I’m not s

by Fezzik 6y ago

David Foster Wallace wrote a great book entitled The Pale King that wrestles with the boredom and frustration of our modern office-work related lives. I’m not sure if I grabbed it from that book, but one of his quotes I enjoy is: "The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breath, so to speak, without air. The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish." I find him to be a breath of fresh air, in his books and interviews, in describing how miraculous yet constrained our lives are. It helps me not burn-out. I think.

jujugatsby 6y ago
Is that why he never fired Michael? :)
- Balgair 6y ago
  I'm not a DFW person, but I'm assuming you're referring to The Office? If that is the case, then Ribbonfarm has an excellent (and in depth) piece on how The Office portrays modern life. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ In essence, Michael never got fired because he is the graphite control rod in the reactor of capitalism. A clueless person that posture-talks to all, but is baby-talked to back. His class absorbs the hits for his sociopath bosses that come from the loser employees. He can't be fired because if his class was removed, then the cycle of strikes would start up again. He is a sacrificial galvanic anode, rusting away to save the ship. At least per what Ribbonfarm says. It's not a kind look at The Office.
alextheparrot 6y ago
I always struggle with DFW. I too enjoy his interviews, some of his writing - he always feels like he’s figured something out. The part where I struggle is when looking at him holistically, especially his suicide. How could he have figured it out and still commit suicide? To use Camus’s framing, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide”. The difficulty of understanding someone taking their own life is made greater when that person was a role model. Their descent into the abyss was a personal journey, but the torch they’d been carrying was a communal flame. I find myself doubting what they said, worrying their flame leads me down the same path they traveled without deviation.
- keiferski 6y ago
  “There is a false saying, ‘Whoever cannot save himself - how can he save others?’ But if I have the key to your chains, why should your and my lock be the same?” - Nietzsche Requiring everyone to only present solutions which have personally worked for them seems like an overly-drastic way to limit useful human knowledge.
- tasuki 6y ago
  > “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide” What about consciousness? The nature of reality? Suicide feels like a trivial topic compared to these two.
  - alextheparrot 6y ago
    Those are all violent, we didn't choose to be conscious, for reality to be as it is, to be born. Suicide is the only revolt against that state of affairs. If we ask "What is the meaning of life", it is sensible to find it in the affairs that keep us from ending life or to see examples of lives where the person didn't see a meaning to life and thus ended their own. The second part is the root of my difficulty with DFW. If someone says things that matter to me, but then commits suicide, is that them declaring they don't think those things mattered? What that really means, the act of suicide, encapsulates all the violence of being brought into this world without choice and the search for peace within those confines. It is an answer, in a world full of questions, I suppose. To give a construction I just was mulling over based on your response, I think the meaning of life is like a prison cell, whereas consciousness and reality are just features of the cell. Yes, we can ask "Why is a bed here" and it might give us comfort to know that it is so I don't need to sleep on the cold floor. But at the end of the day, the question of most importance is "Why am I locked in this cell?". We can only understand the cell completely by understanding what desires drive men to break out.
    - Fezzik 6y ago
      My understanding about DFW’s suicide is that he had recently gone off medication - cold turkey - that he had been taking for quite a while to manage his (severe) mental health problems and that was a primary contributor to the event. If anything, his suicide illuminates the fragility of many people and how they are truly teetering on a knife’s edge due to chemical reactions beyond their immediate control. Before he killed himself he had written (at least a few times) about finding meaning in the companionship of dogs and how he was finally “happy” with his state of being which, I think, contributed to stopping his medication.

by Fezzik 6y ago

jujugatsby 6y ago

Is that why he never fired Michael? :)

Balgair 6y ago
I'm not a DFW person, but I'm assuming you're referring to The Office? If that is the case, then Ribbonfarm has an excellent (and in depth) piece on how The Office portrays modern life. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ In essence, Michael never got fired because he is the graphite control rod in the reactor of capitalism. A clueless person that posture-talks to all, but is baby-talked to back. His class absorbs the hits for his sociopath bosses that come from the loser employees. He can't be fired because if his class was removed, then the cycle of strikes would start up again. He is a sacrificial galvanic anode, rusting away to save the ship. At least per what Ribbonfarm says. It's not a kind look at The Office.

alextheparrot 6y ago

I always struggle with DFW. I too enjoy his interviews, some of his writing - he always feels like he’s figured something out. The part where I struggle is when looking at him holistically, especially his suicide. How could he have figured it out and still commit suicide? To use Camus’s framing, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide”. The difficulty of understanding someone taking their own life is made greater when that person was a role model. Their descent into the abyss was a personal journey, but the torch they’d been carrying was a communal flame. I find myself doubting what they said, worrying their flame leads me down the same path they traveled without deviation.

keiferski 6y ago
“There is a false saying, ‘Whoever cannot save himself - how can he save others?’ But if I have the key to your chains, why should your and my lock be the same?” - Nietzsche Requiring everyone to only present solutions which have personally worked for them seems like an overly-drastic way to limit useful human knowledge.
tasuki 6y ago
> “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide” What about consciousness? The nature of reality? Suicide feels like a trivial topic compared to these two.
- alextheparrot 6y ago
  Those are all violent, we didn't choose to be conscious, for reality to be as it is, to be born. Suicide is the only revolt against that state of affairs. If we ask "What is the meaning of life", it is sensible to find it in the affairs that keep us from ending life or to see examples of lives where the person didn't see a meaning to life and thus ended their own. The second part is the root of my difficulty with DFW. If someone says things that matter to me, but then commits suicide, is that them declaring they don't think those things mattered? What that really means, the act of suicide, encapsulates all the violence of being brought into this world without choice and the search for peace within those confines. It is an answer, in a world full of questions, I suppose. To give a construction I just was mulling over based on your response, I think the meaning of life is like a prison cell, whereas consciousness and reality are just features of the cell. Yes, we can ask "Why is a bed here" and it might give us comfort to know that it is so I don't need to sleep on the cold floor. But at the end of the day, the question of most importance is "Why am I locked in this cell?". We can only understand the cell completely by understanding what desires drive men to break out.
  - Fezzik 6y ago
    My understanding about DFW’s suicide is that he had recently gone off medication - cold turkey - that he had been taking for quite a while to manage his (severe) mental health problems and that was a primary contributor to the event. If anything, his suicide illuminates the fragility of many people and how they are truly teetering on a knife’s edge due to chemical reactions beyond their immediate control. Before he killed himself he had written (at least a few times) about finding meaning in the companionship of dogs and how he was finally “happy” with his state of being which, I think, contributed to stopping his medication.