The Optimism of David Foster Wallace

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I think the effort of David Foster Wallace is also not supposed to be something that we are supposed to applaud as a triumph of connecting with with somebody else because it just sounds like David Foster Wallace to you know and his own neuroses. I love the part where he he tries meditation and he finds that he's so good at it because he's just trying to impress the meditation teacher and meditation teacher saw through him. The real ear more enduring and sentimental part of him commanding that other part to be silent as if looking at levelly in the eye and saying almost allowed not another wordlike he's trying to quiet now this David Wallace is trying to quiet the voice in his own head.

Our whole lives we’ve been frauds. We’re not exaggerating. Pretty much all we’ve ever done is try to create a certain impression of us in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. This episode is a perfect example, Tamler pretending to be a cinephile (check out his four favorite pieces of 2019 “pop culture” in the first segment), David trying to connect with the people (Baby Yoda, Keanu Reeves etc.) – and of course what could be more fraudulent than a deep dive into a David Foster Wallace story, rhapsodizing over the endless sentences, the logical paradoxes, the seven-layer bean-dip of metacommentary (Jesus Christ I’m surprised there aren’t like eight footnotes in this episode description), and meanwhile the Partially Examined Life dudes refresh their overcast feeds and wonder through the tiny keyhole of themselves how David and Tamler have sunk so low that they’d ramble on about “Good Old Neon” like a couple of first year Comp-Lit grad students trying to impress that girl who works at the Cajun bakery.