We Are Living in Infinite Jest

A side note to my previous post: the centrality of entertainment is a major theme of Infinite Jest, which is why in many ways it is the novel for the Trump era, down to its Trumpy president. And in fact, the analogy to addiction is a pretty good one. Our bodies are designed to attach pleasure to evolutionarily useful activities like eating nutritious food and having sex. Drugs are among the technologies that unbundle these things. In fact they strip pleasure down to its essence. This is not always a bad thing! But it can be incredibly bad for us.