When David Foster Wallace, author of the critically acclaimed novel Infinite Jest (1996), committed suicide in 2008 at the age of 46 there was widespread dismay. Why would someone who had everything—health, talent, love, success—want to kill himself? What happened?
Early reports mentioned that he suffered from clinical depression and was dependent on Nardil, an antidepressant whose side effects included ‘somnolence, insomnia, anorexia, weight gain, vomiting, diarrhea, constipation, tremors, hypotension, and anorgasmia.’ It’s hard to imagine not feeling suicidal when that is the thing that’s supposed to keep you sane.
A couple of months after his death, Rolling Stone magazine published a comprehensive article on Wallace’s life that laid bare the attitudes, habits, and decisions that made him depressed. As the New Escapologist’s Eudaemonlogy Editor, I am fascinated by how people live and wanted to investigate the reasons for Wallace’s depression and, perhaps, offer some escape routes for those in a similar situation.
Unreasonably High Expectations
To feel lousy it helps to set absurdly high expectations for yourself from an early age. David Foster Wallace was both a talented tennis player as a teenager and had preternatural intellectual abilities that enabled him to study philosophy to a mindbogglingly sophisticated level. Everyone expected him to do exceptionally well. His subsequent receipt of the MacArthur Fellowship, a $500,000 “genius grant”, only served to exacerbate the anxiety of not fulfilling his potential. As Cyril Connolly said, “Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.” And so it was with Wallace, who had a nervous breakdown at University.
The higher the expectations, the more inflated your ego becomes and it is the ego that gets in the way of enjoying life.
Fear of Failure
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable
The great thing about failure is that although it feels bad at the time, it is a brilliant way of learning. Every time you complete something (and it helps to complete things even if you know they’re not great) you have an opportunity to learn from your mistakes and fail better next time. Wallace didn’t embrace failure:
“I started hating everything I did,” he said. “Worse than stuff I’d done in college. Hopelessly confused, unbelievably bad. I was really in a panic, I didn’t think I was going to be able to write anymore. When you’re writing well, you establish a voice in your head, and it shuts up the other voices. The ones that are saying, ‘You’re not good enough, you’re a fraud.’ ”
Embracing failure and using it as a learning tool allows you to cheerfully ignore such voices. This method helps you to stop tying your ego into your work you can be free from value judgements. Those voices in your head have no authority over you, they don’t exist. Wallace consciously wanted to write novels that would be read in a 100 years, a massive and pointless anxiety. In the cosmic scheme of things nothing matters, nothing is important, so enjoy the moment.
Chemical Abuse
Most teenagers enjoy testing the limits of conscious experience with the help of drugs and alcohol. It is a rite of passage, undertaken everywhere from Airdrie to the Amazon. It is an experimental phase which produces mixed data but consistent conclusions: drugs and alcohol are interesting in moderation but one wouldn’t want to overdo it. David Foster Wallace, in his 20s, used to enjoy being with “women who were pretty heavily into drugs – that was kind of alluring to Dave – skanking around Somerville, drinking himself blotto.”
Eventually he became teetotal, incapable of moderation, which is even more depressing.
Inflexibility
Behaviour and mood are states. They are not your personality. The more flexible you are in your life, the easier it is to change your state from one that is unproductive to one that is productive. David Foster Wallace wasn’t flexible, rigidly following routines and incapable of dealing with life when it upset his plans:
“Wallace regarded [his breakdown] as a failure, something he should have been able to control. He routinized his life. He’d be the first tray at the dining hall for supper, he’d eat, drink coffee dipped with tea bags, library study till 11, head back to the room, turn on Hawaii Five-O.”
Another aspect of this inflexibility was his choice of clothing: in all pictures he looks entirely awful wearning a bandana and the sportswear. It starts off looking like an escape from the norm and ends up being entirely inappropriate, locking you into the coffin of your own ego, reducing you to a few ill-chosen possibilities. Be free with your identity: it doesn’t exist.
Misplaced Comfort
The modern world is full of things that appear to offer comfort and solace but which actually make you weaker and less able to deal with life’s challenges. Alcohol warms your cockles but fills you with toxins, cake helps produce endorphins but makes you lardy and unfit, television has schadenfreude and diversion on tap 24 hours a day but rots your brain. It goes on and on.
Before he died, Wallace had moved in with his parents who did their best to comfort him and help him from his stupor:
“Wallace and his parents would get up at six in the morning and walk the dogs. They watched DVDs of The Wire. Sally cooked David’s favorite dishes, heavy comfort foods – pot pies, casseroles, strawberries in cream.”
This sounds kindly, but when you’re depressed such comfort acts as a kind of reward for being depressed. I recommend shaking yourself out of depressive routines by exercising and going on an ultra-healthy diet. Detox yourself from all the crap and live free. Light and free, having sloughed off the vacant skin of your previous self. Be different, don’t dig yourself into a hole.
Shunning obligations
“It was around this time that the Wallaces noticed something strange about David. He would voice surprising requests, like wanting to paint his bedroom black. He was constantly angry at his sister. When he was 16, he refused to go to her birthday party. “Why would I want to celebrate her birthday?” he told his parents.”
Intelligent teenagers question the world around them with an all-encompassing “why?” This is much fun, but is really bad for your mental health. All those conventions and obligations, like being with your family and celebrating birthdays may seem worthless to the teenager but they help form the world beyond your ego. Man is a social animal who needs affection on a physiological level. The health chimpanzee rejected from the group deteriorates quickly, its fur becoming infested with ticks. The same happens with human beings psychologically.
Conclusion
The case of David Foster Wallace shows that depression is a spiral: no one is born clinically depressed; it is something you cultivate, often in your misguided teenage years, going round and round until you find yourself marooned on the outer edges of sanity. It also shows that depression may be avoidable if you avoid egotism, embrace failure, cultivate obligations, and be more flexible.
This article was originally published in issue three of New Escapologist magazine.
Read my other New Escapologist articles.