The Peter Attia Drive - Qualy #38 - Finding meaning in struggle and why we are less happy than ever (David Foster Wallace)

Episode Date: October 9, 2019

Today's episode of The Qualys is from podcast #15 – Paul Conti, M.D.: trauma, suicide, community, and self-compassion. The Qualys is a subscriber-exclusive podcast, released Tuesday through Friday, and published exclusively on our private, subscriber-only podcast feed. Qualys is short-hand for “qualifying round,” which are typically the fastest laps driven in a race car—done before the race to determine starting position on the grid for race day. The Qualys are short (i.e., “fast”), typically less than ten minutes, and highlight the best questions, topics, and tactics discussed on The Drive. Occasionally, we will also release an episode on the main podcast feed for non-subscribers, which is what you are listening to now. Learn more: https://peterattiamd.com/podcast/qualys/   Subscribe to receive access to all episodes of The Qualys (and other exclusive subscriber-only content): https://peterattiamd.com/subscribe/  Connect with Peter on Facebook.com/PeterAttiaMD | Twitter.com/PeterAttiaMD | Instagram.com/PeterAttiaMD 

Welcome to the Qualies, a subscriber exclusive podcast. Qualies is just a shorthand slang for a qualification round, which is something you do prior to the race, just a little bit quicker. Qualies podcast features episodes that are short, and we're hoping for less than 10 minutes each, which highlight the best questions, topics, tactics, etc. discussed on previous episodes of the drive. We recognize many of you as new listeners to the podcast may not have the time to go back and listen to every episode, and those of you who have already listened may have forgotten. So the new episodes of the quality is going to be released Tuesday through Friday,

and they're going to be published exclusively on our private subscriber-only podcast feed. Now occasionally we're going to release quality episodes in the main feed, which is what you're about to hear now. If you enjoy these episodes, and if you're interested in hearing more, as well as receiving all of the other subscriber exclusive content, which is growing by the month, you can visit us at pterotiamb.com forward slash subscribe.

So without further delay, I hope you enjoy today's quality. You know, you said something a moment ago that made me think of one of my favorite talks. So, you know, you know that I'm the biggest fan of David Foster Wallace, this person who I've just always been kind of so amazed by his insight. I just, you know, here's a guy who was not a trained psychiatrist, he's a writer. And yet, his insights into humanity go beyond almost anything I think. Here's a guy who was not a trained psychiatrist. He's a writer and yet His insights into humanity go beyond almost anything. I think you couldn't learn this stuff in textbook and You know, I've been asked before like if you could bring anybody back from the dead, you know of recent era, right? Who would it be and I think it would be him?

You know if I could if I could go back in time and spend a day with anybody, it would probably be with David Foster Wallace. He has a very famous commencement speech from 2005 that he delivered at Kenyon College titled Vises Water. And in it, he talks about the fact that we're, I think he, the way he describes it is, there's no such thing as atheism. We are all worshiping some God. Do you worship money?

Power, your body, you know, your physical allure. And he almost makes the case that at least if you pick a God to worship, the harm to you might be less. Because if it is money, you worship, you'll never have enough. If it's power, you worship, you'll never feel strong enough. If it's intellect that you worship, you'll always feel like a fraud. And I remember listening to this for the very first time, which was many years ago in thinking, yeah, I get that. Like I really get that. Like I know I'm not alone, but I think a lot of people who place their self worth and they're intellect, you think, what if people find out I'm not that smart? Like I'm just a fraud.

And you know, it's, again, it's just, it just speaks to this entire nature of humanity. And of course, the tragedy in the case of David Foster Wallace is that he ends up taking his own life by suicide three years after he gave that talk. Now totally unrelated, I want wanna play something for you. So I was actually just listening to this today. Now I hadn't come across this before, but this is an interview with David Foster Wallace and Terry Gross from NPR.

I believe it was 97. So it was like a year or two after infinite just came out. So I wanna play this for you if I can queue it up on my phone here. Cause I thought of you as soon as I heard this, right? Okay, here we go. You know, I really like the way you talk. You write about a pleasure and how difficult it can be to really achieve.

You write about pleasure in the infinite jest your latest novel. And I'm thinking, you know, one of the things relating to that, in infinite just one of the characters finds that marijuana is marijuana is no longer a pleasurable experience, it just makes them terribly self-conscious and therefore anxious. And I'm wondering what happens to you when you do something that's supposed to give you pleasure and that just makes you uncomfortable or anxious? Boy, I'm not really even sure how to respond to that. Look, a lot of the impetus for writing, if in a chest, was just the fact that I was about

30 and I had a lot of friends who were about 30 and we'd all been grotesquely overeducated and privileged our whole lives and had better health care and more money than our parents did. And we were all extraordinarily sad. I think it has something to do with being raised in an era when really the ultimate value seems to be, I mean a successful life is, let's see, you make a lot of money and you have a really attractive spouse or you get infamous or famous in some way, so that it's a life where you basically experience as much pleasure as possible,

which ends up being sort of empty and locality, that the reason I don't like talking about it discursively is it sounds very banal and cliche, when you say it out loud that way. Believe it or not, this came as something of an epiphany to us at around age 30, sitting around talking about why on earth we were so miserable when we'd been so lucky. Well, when did you realize that all the benefits you had in an educated middle class life

weren't bringing you happiness? Well, I guess it sort of depends on what you mean by happiness. I mean, it's not like we were walking around fingering razor blades or anything like that, but it just sort of seems as if we sort of knew how happy our parents were. And we would compare our lives with our parents and see that at least on the surface

we're according to the criteria that the culture lays down for a successful happy life. We were actually doing better than a lot of them were. And so why on earth were we so miserable? I don't think, I don't mean to suggest that it was, you know, a state of constant clinical depression or that we all felt that we were supposed to be blissfully happy all the time.

There was just, I have a very weird and amateur sense that an enormous part of like my generation and the generation right after mine is just an extremely sad sort of lost generation, which when you think about the material, comforts and the political freedoms that we enjoy is just an extremely sad sort of lost generation, which when you think about the material, comforts, and the political freedoms that we enjoy is just strange. I could listen to interviews with David, well, indefinitely, but it's interesting that I came across that today for the first time, again, I don't know how I missed it. Today, just literally today.

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