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

Podcast Notes Finding Meaning in Struggle and Why We Are Less Happy Than Ever (David Foster Wallace) Peter is a massive fan of David Foster Wallace, particularly his famous commencement speech (which he tries to relisten to every month or so)“I’ve been asked before, ‘If you could bring anyone back from the dead, who would it be?’ I think it’d be him. If I could go back in time and spend a day with anybody, it’d probably be with David Foster Wallace.”– Peter AttiaIn the commencement speech, David discusses how we all worship something: whether money, power, your body/physical allure, etc.“He almost makes the case that at least if you pick a God to worship, the harm to you might be less. If it’s money you worship, you’ll never have enough. If it’s power you worship, you’ll never feel strong enough. If it’s intellect you worship, you’ll always feel like a fraud.” – Peter AttiaPeople who place their self-worth in their intellect continuously have feelings of self-doubtSadly, David ended up taking his own life by suicide 3 years after he gave the talkRelated – check out David Foster Wallace’s interview with Terry Gross in 1997David is asked about his novel, Infinite Jest, and how he thinks about pleasure:“A lot of the impetus for writing Infinite Jest 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 over-educated our whole lives, had better healthcare 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 where a successful life is making a lot of money, having an attractive spouse, or getting famous in some way, allowing you to experience as much pleasure as possible. This ends up being empty and low-calorie… Believe it or not, this came as an epiphany at age 30, sitting around talking about why on earth we were so miserable when we’d been so lucky.” “I have a very weird and amateur sense than an enormous part of my generation, and the generation right after mine is an extremely sad and lost generation. When you think about the material comforts and political freedoms we enjoy, it’s just strange.”

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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.

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