Life Lessons

Here are some interesting comments on life that Ben Casnocha made after reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.

On what you learn from a substance recovery clinic:

• That there’s a certain type of person who carries a picture of their therapist in their wallet.
• That (both a relief and a kind of an odd let-down) black penises
  tend to be the same general size as white penises, on the whole.
• That certain persons simply will not like you no matter what you
  do. Then that most nonaddicted adult civilians have already absorbed
  and accepted this fact, often rather early on.
• That no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that.
• That sleeping can be a form of emotional escape and can with sustained effort be abused.
• That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it.
• That loneliness is not a function of solitude.
• That cliquey alliance and exclusion and gossip can be forms of escape.
• That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people.
• That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.
• That it is simply more pleasant to be happy than it is to be pissed off.
• That 99% of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves. That
  most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning
  they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own
  thinking.
• That the people to be most frightened of are the people who are the most frightened.
• That it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.
• That you don’t have to hit somebody even if you really really want to.
• That pretty much everybody masturbates.
• That everybody’s sneeze sounds different.
• That having sex with someone you do not care for feels lonelier than not having sex in the first place, afterward.
• The shopworn “Act in Haste, Repent at Leisure” would seem to have been custom-designed for the case of tattoos.
• That “acceptance” is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
• That different people have radically different ideas of basic personal hygiene.
• That, perversely, it is often more fun to want something than to have it.
• That if you do something nice for somebody in secret, anonymously,
  without letting the person you did it for know it was you or anybody
  else know what it was you did or in any way shape or form trying to get
  credit for it, it’s almost its own form of intoxicating buzz.
• That everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
• That AA and NA does not apparently require that you believe in Him/Her/It before He/She/It will help you.
• That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt.

Ben is a totally fascinating guy to me, this is his personal summary of last year and yep he has just turned 20! I’m hoping to do two weeks in the language school he went to in Costa Rica on my big trip 🙂

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