Become Immersive
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§1
“To breath, so to speak, without air … To be, in a word, unborable.” —The Pale King, David Foster Wallace, 2011, p. 440.
Question for you: What do the following three people have in common? 1) a young boy who spends hours a day contorting himself in very painful ways so that he can eventually lick every part of his own body, including “the papery skin around his anus” and the back of his own neck; 2) a GS-13 Revenue Agent at the Peoria, Illinois IRS Technical Auditing Branch who can complete over 100 tax audits per day and levitates a little bit while doing so; and 3) a verbose college kid addicted to Adderall who is able to tap into such heightened states of awareness that he is even aware that he is aware of being aware and can describe everything around him with near-perfect clarity.
Keep that question in mind—we’re going to come back to that later.
§2
“Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui—these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.” —The Pale King, Wallace, 2011, p. 233.
The Pale King is a 550-or-so-page unfinished novel written by David Foster Wallace, published posthumously in 2011. The novel follows the lives of several peculiar people living in or around Peoria, Illinois, during the 1980s. Each of these characters has been called to account and now works for the Internal Revenue Service—yes, the IRS, the same government organization that we U.S. citizens curse out loud by name during the yearly American pastime of stepping into that figurative Iron Maiden, wherein a single wrong move can land us in federal prison, also known as filing our taxes. For context, if you—reader—are not from America, filing U.S. taxes is complicated and can take hours for the average citizen. And it only gets more complicated as one gets older due to the natural buildup of assets, dependents, and income over time. Basically, filing taxes is a tedious, boring task, but it’s something we all must do whether we like it or not—and if it seems like I’m going off on a tangent, well, maybe, but that last part about the tedious boredom will become very relevant very soon.
The Pale King is a work of fiction; and when I say “fiction,” I mean that in the loosest way possible. The novel—much like Wallace’s earlier work of encyclopedic fiction, Infinite Jest—sort of defies categorization in that it has no narrative starting point or cohesive structure or conclusion, all while claiming that it is a work of autobiographical nonfiction written by none other than David Foster Wallace himself, who is a character in the novel; and this simulacrum of David Foster Wallace strongly insists that he wrote the novel as a “vocational memoir” and that the only fictional thing in the book is the disclaimer on the copyright page, which states, “The characters and events in this book are fictitious.” And this sets up quite a clever metafictional titty-pinching paradox, all while Wallace himself insists that he hates clever metafictional titty-pinching paradoxes—and, if you're confused, I’m referring to the character in the novel having said this, not the author, or maybe they’re the same? I’m still not sure. In fact, there are actually two characters named David Wallace in the novel, both of whom work for the IRS—totaling three Wallaces if we include the real-life author of the book—so, as you can imagine, it gets even more confusing; and it becomes even more confusing still when an error in the IRS computer system mixes up the two David Wallaces, causing a number of highly confusing yet very humorous downstream consequences for Mr. Wallace, which kinda ends up mirroring how the reader might feel about the whole thing—that being: incredibly confused. And, of course, this clerical IRS fuck-up introduces yet another clever metafictional paradox that David Wallace supposedly does not like at all, per his own words in the novel that he supposedly wrote about himself that is totally a nonfictional vocational memoir, or something. And, sadly, due to the incompleteness of the novel, we never get to find out what happens to any of the two (three?) David Wallaces.
The incompleteness of the novel’s narrative is partially due to the fact that it is indeed an unfinished novel, but even regardless of that, one gets the impression that, if the novel had been completed, the story still wouldn’t have resolved itself in any traditional manner—if it can even be called a “story” to begin with; as it’s more like a loose collection of anecdotes, diatribes, long-winded tax law explanations, tangents, poignant character pieces, and quirky encounters all tied together by the common themes of cosmic boredom, people vs. automation, devils actually being angels, identity, systems vs. individuals, what is nonconformity really?, mindless repetitive busy work, awareness of self and others and surroundings, realism vs. anti-realism, every love story being a ghost story, the impacts of solipsistic navel-gazing, and overcoming that aforementioned cosmic boredom through the power of transcendental focus; and that last theme is what really stuck with me during the two months it took me to finish this novel: the power to look past the boredom and see the beauty beyond, the power to become immersed.
And, if you can harness this power of immersion, you yourself become immersive.
Reading The Pale King is a lot like just being an average working adult in the first-world 21st century: that whole existential dread of “Am I just going to be fiddling with papers and spreadsheets and emails for the rest of my life?”; the whole, “I used to be a young rebel who fancied myself different from the rest of those pathetic sheeple but now here I am just sitting at a desk five days a week part of the very same system that I once claimed so vehemently to hate” type of thing; and all the different ways that people cope with these crushing realizations—if they’re even “crushing” at all. Perhaps, instead, these realizations are just narcissistic navel-gazing, a faux-sophisticated lamenting-of-self that only serves to paralyze the mind and prevent self-improvement? And in this way, The Pale King is almost like a coming-to-grips-with-reality type thing: a learning-to-deal-with-it type thing; a figuring-out-how-to-see-past-the-boredom-to-the-beauty-beyond type thing. The Pale King makes you think about this kinda stuff. And, much like life itself, The Pale King seems gravely serious at times, but, five pages later, those same gravely serious things seem pointless and boring. Throughout the novel, stuff builds up but ultimately never resolves, instead just kinda fizzling out with a whimper, becoming just another “whatever happened with that?” type of thing; and the fact that The Pale King itself is incomplete only strengthens this fizzling-out feeling, which mirrors the modern-life-is-a-never-ending-trial-of-boredom type feeling that the novel’s characters (and you: the reader) are coming to grips with; in fact, per the author’s notes on page 548 of the “Now With Four Previously Unpublished Scenes!” paperback edition of the novel, David Foster Wallace (the real one, not the simulacrum—I think?) writes: “Plot a series of set-ups for stuff happening, but nothing actually happens.” And that is precisely what The Pale King is: boring.
But if we look past the boredom we find the beauty beyond—which is that The Pale King is consistently brilliant and beautifully poignant and stylistically innovative and deeply existential and laugh-out-loud funny while also being deadly serious and just one hell of a life-changing read.
And, if you’ll hear (read?) me out, I want to take the rest of this essay to explain why The Pale King is indeed life-changing.
§3
“To put it another way, the pie has been made—the contest is now in the slicing. Gentlemen, you aspire to hold the knife. Wield it.” —The Pale King, Wallace, 2011, p. 234.
I write most of my stuff on a computer that’s hooked up to multiple monitors, and while typing up those first couple sections up there, I found myself clicking various bookmarks in my browser’s bookmarks bar, checking all my favorite sites to see if they had updated since the last time I had checked them only minutes earlier. (And if this seems non-sequiturous in comparison to the previous sections, please just bear with me.) First, I checked my own website (howdoyouspell.cool, the same site you’re likely reading this on right now) to see if the view count went up on my recent article (it didn’t and hasn’t for a few days, and I know that, yet I continue to check); then I typed a few sentences; then I checked my email (note that I have email notifications on my mobile phone set to play the classic AOL “You’ve got mail” soundbite, and those notifications are quite loud indeed, meaning that when I get an email, I am made aware of it almost immediately regardless of where I’m at or what I’m doing; yet, even knowing this, I still check my email every few minutes regardless of notificaiton alerts [post hoc I tell myself that I do this because my phone misses notifications sometimes due to low signal strength or whatever, but somewhere deep down I surely know this justification to be bullshit, as evidenced by my typing up this lengthy parenthetical aside that probably could have been cut from the essay]); then I wrote a few more sentences; then I checked my RSS reader to see if there were any new articles published (there were no new articles, as was the case when I had last checked only a few minutes prior); then I wrote a few more sentences; then I checked my Last.fm account (a service that tracks music I listen to) to see if anyone messaged me there (no one ever messages me there); then I typed up a few more sentences; then I checked a fourm to see if anyone had replied to one of my posts (note that these replies are also forwarded to my email, and we’ve already covered the whole mobile-email-notification thing); then I swapped the order of the phrases “papery skin around his anus” and “the back of his own neck,” as I figured that putting the shocking anus quote first was more attention-grabbing than the neck thing (note that licking the back of your own neck is impossible to do, by the way [but surely you already knew that, I would hope]); then I finished typing up both sections up there; then I checked my Libre.fm account (which is the non-corporate federated version of Last.fm that also tracks the music I listen to and consequently mirrors my Last.fm account one-to-one so it’s basically just looking at Last.fm in a different format; yet even knowing this, I still check it anyway, despite the service having no message or follow features to speak of, meaning there’s really no reason to check this one at all [i.e., literally a mindless click and nothing more]); then I spot-checked the grammar and spelling of the aforementioned sections up there; then I checked Lemmy (which is a federated link aggregator, basically non-corporate Reddit [and I really don’t care for either of these services but still use them for reasons I won’t analyze here in this essay, for the sake of time]); and then, finally, I moved on to writing this long-winded paragraph you’re about to finish reading right now, wherein the attention-deficit writing process outlined herein repeated itself once more.
And this distraction nexus isn’t something I get sucked into only when I sit down to write; it happens with everything that I do. It’s as if I’m a celestial body being pulled into a supermassive black hole, and that supermassive black hole is a smartphone or a computer screen or whatever. The worst part is that I’m supposedly aware of this happening, yet I continue to allow myself to be sucked in, as if my so-called free will is being subverted in such a way that I still feel like I have a choice in the matter or something. It’s all very confusing and distressing when I think about it.
So, the question I always end up at is: How do I turn my true passions into the supermassive black hole at the center of my galaxy? Which means that the real question behind the question is: How do I excise all the bullshit?
Now, regarding my lack of focus, you may be thinking something like, “That sounds like a you problem,” and you may be right about that to some extent: I do have some attention-deficit, hyperactive tendencies. But if I were a gambling person, I would bet that you—yes, you, the reader—can relate to the cycle of distraction that I outlined in the previous paragraph; in fact, I would bet big big money that you can relate to it on a deeply personal level. And I would make that bet confidently because we both live in the same oversaturated media environment wherein literally thousands of services—both commercial and noncommercial—are competing for our attention on the hourly. There is just so much stuff to do: so many sites to check and so many social media posts to read and so many headlines to ingest and so many video games to play and so many television shows to watch and so many celebrities to keep track of and so many books to read and so many movies to stream and so many songs to listen to and so on and so forth. And it’s all right there—yes, right there, on whatever device you’re reading this on—just a single click or swipe or button-press away.
All of this stuff has been made so on-demand that we have been conditioned to think that we should be finding cool new things literally all the time, and thus are endlessly searching for this new cool stuff, so much so that when we are listening to the same songs or watching the same television shows or reading the same books or playing the same video games or checking the same sites or doing literally anything at all, we subconsciously believe that something super incredible must have slipped our attention, and that, surely, if we just reload the page or change the channel or scroll the list just a few more times, we will find that incredible something that we had missed. We have been conditioned via an endless stream of information to feel as if we are missing out on quote-unquote incredible things that may or may not even exist. And this fear of missing out is being exploited on a cosmic scale by faceless entities all to make a quick buck. It’s some sort of cosmic FOMO that’s being tapped into here. And this cosmic FOMO is destroying our ability to concentrate on any one thing for longer than the time it takes for your Twitter feed to load.
One of the central themes of The Pale King is the idea that being able to superfocus on a task—the ability to see past the boredom to the beauty beyond—can lead to some sort of transcendental awakening. In fact, in the novel, the IRS is searching for people who can tap into this state of superfocus, as those who can do this would obviously make for the best tax auditors.
Remember back in §1: that GS-13 Revenue Agent at the Peoria, Illinois, IRS Technical Auditing Branch who can complete over 100 tax audits per day? Well, that's Shane Drinion, and he’s one of those people who can superfocus to such an extent that he slightly levitates off the floor while doing so; someone even caught him levitating upside down in his office while auditing tax returns one time. And, when Shane is in conversation, he can superfocus on whatever his interlocutor is saying to such an extent that he fully comprehends everything being said and can draw some profound connections that would be missed otherwise, and he slightly levitates then too. Shane never became bored or frustrated or anxious or procrastinatory or evasive during any situation he found himself in—regardless of how tedious or loquacious—because he was instead superfocused, seeing past the boredom to the beauty beyond. And, while reading through the sections of The Pale King featuring Shane Drinion, I kept thinking to myself—why can’t I superfocus? Why can’t I see beyond the boredom? Is it a me problem? Or is it because we now live in a society wherein it’s harder than ever to focus due to the overabundance of easily accessible distractions? Or is it both?
In many ways, our society resembles the near-future dystopia of David Foster Wallace’s second novel, Infinite Jest, published in 1996—which is set in a world wherein entertainment and pleasure rule above all else (and, in the novel, there is even a movie that is just so compelling that anyone who watches it become totally obsessed and just withers away right there in front of the television set, which, when compared to smartphones or social media or MMORPGs, is just a little too allegorically accurate for comfort). Our modern society’s Infinite Jest-ness is so uncanny that it’s almost as if David Foster Wallace accurately predicted the future—was he a prophet, or was society’s trajectory into this oversaturated corporate self-gratification nexus so plainly obvious to anyone living in the ’90s, provided they possessed half a brain? Prophetic visions or nay, the fact of the matter is that this is where we’re at now; regardless of what our individual interests are—be it literature, reality television, movies, writing, erotic humiliation, video games, accounting, beetle fighting, painting, woodworking, contorting your body in weird ways so that you can lick your own butthole, sports, whatever—our modern media/information landscape now provides just so much of whatever we want whenever we want that everything starts to feel kinda cheap and expendable, so we are always trying to find the next best thing. We might find an incredible movie today, but there’s always another hypothetical incredible movie to watch, and another and another and another, and when we can’t find that next incredible movie to watch, we start to feel like we’re missing out on something; this missing-out feeling, in turn, makes us feel anxious, and this, in turn, makes us delve even deeper into all the digital menus trying to find all the incredible stuff that we might have missed out on; and when we do find that new incredible thing, it’s never good enough because there’s just so much other quote-unquote incredible stuff out there that we’re supposedly missing out on, so we start to feel anxious again, and this makes us delve even deeper still into all the menus trying to find all the incredible stuff we might have missed out on; and when we do find that stuff, it’s just not good enough because there’s just so much other quote-unquote incredible stuff out there that we might be missing out on as well, so we start to feel anxious again, and, yeah, I think you get the point.
“Think about it. You watch one thing, there’s eleven other things you can’t watch. You’re having to not-choose more and more just to be able to choose anything. It’s too much.” —The Pale King (Reading Group Guide), Wallace, 2011, p. 24.
Reach deep down inside and it becomes self-evident that this whole distraction ouroboros makes us feel like shit—so I end up right back where I started, asking the same question: How do I excise all the bullshit?
In other words, how do I wield the knife?
And, as I neared the end of The Pale King, I couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe the solution to this cosmic FOMO nexus actually lay within the pages of the novel itself; in that one recurring theme that I just could not stop thinking about: the ability to see past the boredom to the beauty beyond, the ability to become immersed and thus become immersive.
And, with that in mind, I have another question for you:
When was the last time you felt immersed?
§4
I’m not talking like watching-a-movie-in-full immersed or reading-a-book-for-an-hour-straight immersed or beating-Ninja-Gaiden-in-one-sitting immersed or an-afternoon-playing-with-your-kids immersed or having-a-romantic-dinner-with-your-partner immersed all the while thinking about all sorts of other stuff. I’m talking about doing any of these things and, while doing said things, literally not thinking about anything else other than those things. I’m talking, like, fully immersed in the stuff that you are doing right now. I am talking, like, reading the words I am typing right here and fully absorbing them into your brain, thinking about nothing else other than these words right here and what they mean and how they might relate to you and your personal situation. I am talking about becoming so immersed that there is literally no room for ennui, loneliness, anger, or boredom of any kind. I am talking about becoming immersive; the ability to look past the boredom, not by letting your mind wander to another thing—like those various browser bookmarks or mobile apps in which you might find the next supposedly incredible thing—but by becoming fully immersed in the thing you are doing so much so that you see the beauty beyond the boredom of it and thus are totally engaged in the thing and thus become immersive and thus all of your so-called problems become irrelevant in that small pocket of spacetime.
Remember the verbose college kid addicted to Adderall that I mentioned in §1? That’s Chris Fogle. He would sit around his dorm doing nothing in particular, kinda drifting, not caring, just overcome with boredom, being a “wastoid” (as he called it). But sometimes, he would take Adderall and tap into these super-heightened states of awareness, which allowed him to see himself from an almost out-of-body perspective; he would become truly aware of what he was doing on a deep level, experiencing what he describes as “a sort of emergence, however briefly, from the fuzziness and drift of my life.” He would become fully immersed in the details:
“I am in this room right now. The shadow of the foot is rotating on the east wall. The shadow is not recognizable as a foot because of the deformation of the angle of the light of the sun’s position behind the sign. I am seated upright in a dark-green easy chair with a cigarette burn on the right armrest. The cigarette burn is black and imperfectly round. The track I am listening to is ‘The Big Ship’ off of Brian Eno’s Another Green World, whose cover has colorful cutout figures inside a white frame.” —The Pale King, Wallace, 2011, p. 184.
Chris Fogle’s observations are simple, but they are ones we often don’t register in the moment. During these episodes, Chris is fully aware; he’s immersed and, as such, notices all the little details. During these episodes, he sees past the boredom to the beauty beyond. And in those small pockets of spacetime, Chris Fogle is immersed, and thus immersive.
I have a lot of experience with Adderall—which is basically just legal speed (which is slang for various types of amphetamines)—as I was prescribed the drug from the ages of 10 to 20 by a legitimate medical professional for the treatment of ADHD (Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder), so I can relate on a deeply personal level to Chris Fogle’s experience, which he calls “doubling” for the odd aware-of-your-own-awareness effect that amphetamines can elicit from the user. Not only that, but when you take Adderall, you become fully immersed in whatever you’re doing. Little things that once seemed mundane now seem interesting. Things that were once tedious are now exciting. Stuff that was once frustrating is now manageable. Taking Adderall is like a little taste of becoming immersive. You are no longer just doing things, drifting, half-paying attention; instead, you are hyperfocused and totally engaged—boredom and tedium and ennui just cease to exist entirely. It’s almost zen.
As I was reading through Chris Fogle’s prolix coming-of-awareness monologue (which is literally 98 pages long, or 18% of this 550-page novel), I suddenly realized that I hadn’t felt truly immersed in anything since I was, like, nineteen years old, playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion whilst high on Adderall, which was about the last time I filled my Adderall prescription, having decided shortly afterward to quit because the comedown was becoming too much and it killed my sex drive, and I was very clearly dependent by that point. The point I’m trying to get to here is that, since then, everything I do has been (and continues to be) interrupted by the constant urge to click or flick a screen, or my mind just goes to a whole other place entirely and thus I am no longer fully focused on whatever it is I sat down to do. For example, just the other day, I was playing Final Fantasy VII but could not stop thinking about how I carelessly used the phrase “as stated in my previous email” in a work email and how that might have come off as rude to the recipient of said email and how that might have damaged my relationship with said recipient; then, as I was exploring some mako reactor or other, I kept lifting my phone to my face to check for new posts on Mastodon (a social media service), and then, as I was battling Jenova for the first time, I kept looking up information on the new Shinichirō Watanabe-directed anime titled Lazarus (marketed as a spiritual successor to Cowboy Bebop with jazz score and all) on Google—all the while, Jenova was beating my ass due to the ongoing ATB (Active Time Battle) system, which I was ignoring every few seconds in favor of all sorts of stupid shit that was invading my mindspace, so much so that I would forget to pause the game and thus game over.
In hindsight, during all those distracted instances, I would like to think that I was aware of what I was doing—that I really wanted to think about those work emails or that I really wanted to check my social media feeds, but did I really? No, I was just drifting; I was just doing things; I was not thinking at all; I was being—as Chris Fogle would put it—a wastoid. I was not aware of the beauty of whatever it was I was trying to do—which was, at the time, play Final Fantasy VII; instead, I was wasting my time and attention, and I wasn’t even aware of it. And you—as the reader—may be thinking something like, “Well, video games are a waste of time to begin with, wouldn’t you want to do something more productive?” But that’s not the point of this whole thing. That’s not the point at all. The point is that this power—this ability to see past the boredom into the beauty beyond—can be applied to literally anything in life, good or bad: video games, writing, romance, work, drawing, reading, family: anything.
And as I was reading Chris Fogle’s insanely long section, I started to think to myself: why can’t I tap into this power of immersion without the aid of drugs? How can I harness this state of hyperfocus without becoming addicted to speed again? Perhaps this insane level of focus is a fantasy—something inhuman, achievable only through drugs. But then, hope overtook me, and I thought: no, surely I can tap into this power of immersion without drugs; surely, I have some semblance of control over my own thoughts; surely, I can master myself; surely, I can become immersive; surely, I possess the awareness to achieve all of this.
So I went outside, sat down in front of my fence, and stared into the wood for ten minutes; I figured this was the most boring thing that I could do, and by doing this, I figured I could condition myself to see past the boredom into the beauty beyond—at least for a fleeting moment. I watched the wood intently, soon becoming aware of even my own blinking and then soon not, because I determined that that data point was irrelevant and that I would only focus on the wood going forward. Each plank of wood was about the width of my hand and a little taller than myself, standing at 6’1. The surface of the wood appeared aged, its original brown coloring now a faded gray tone; and, considering the home's 1990s construction, I estimated the fence must have been built about twenty years ago. Then I thought about all the hurricanes it must have weathered during that time (as I live[d] in Southeast Georgia right on the Atlantic coast, and we get hit by many hurricanes and/or tropical storms each year). I then noticed all the little lines in the wood, some going from top to bottom, others not; they shared no specific pattern but reminded me of little guided pathways that small insects might travel upon, some of these little pathways obstructed by huge knots, which appeared like the eye of the planet Jupiter, itself basically a massive hurricane; then I started to think about how many hurricanes I myself have weathered, and how during each of those storms I said that I would buy a generator yet still have not purchased one (they are very expensive); but then I realized that I had lost focus on the wood, so I shook my head and told myself, “No, that is irrelevant, a distraction, stay focused on the wood,” and blinked intentionally real hard and then saw the wood for what it was once more. I saw the little nails hammered into the wood every few inches apart; the nails themselves were all different shades of orangish-red, as if rust were the dried blood of metal. I reached out to touch the wood; it was coarse, splintery. Then I slid my index finger over one of the nails, and a fleck of rust attached itself to my finger before I rubbed it away with my thumb. The entire fence started to shake slightly as a squirrel darted across the top of it; this squirrel had a bushy gray tail and cheeks all puffed up. I shifted my focus back to the wood and observed the lines once more; some drooped in such a way that they looked like nicotine stains or paint dripping down the walls of an old room on a hot summer day. Minutes passed. Without even realizing it, I had become immersed in the wood. What I assumed to be another squirrel ran atop the fence, shaking the planks once more, but I did not even look up to get a glimpse of the creature, for I was fully immersed in the wood.
In that small pocket of spacetime, I became immersive.
Then I heard, “Dad, are you alright?” and this broke my immersion. My daughter was standing there, looking down on me with a single eyebrow raised and a slight droop to her lips. I said something like, “Shouldn’t you be doing your homework?” then stood up and wiped the back of my pants and then walked back to my office, all while my daughter stood there in place for a moment, running the is-my-dad-crazy calculus through her head, all wide-eyed and slack-jawed—or so I imagined, as this routine is something I’ve seen her do many times before in response to my behavior (and when she’s older, she’ll understand—is what I tell myself).
When I returned to my office desk, in front of that computer with all the monitors and all the bookmarks and all the tabs all over the place, I immediately broke the immersion spell by clicking into Mastodon to check my social media feed and post something like “I just stared at a plank of wood for ten minutes, lol.” But after a few seconds of doomscrolling, I stopped, stared at the screen with this heavy frown that I could feel very strongly on my face, and, as if the wood gods had cast a spell of epiphany on me, I clicked into profile settings and deleted my Mastodon account right then and there. Then I went to Bluesky (another distraction nexus) and deleted my account there as well. Then I went to Twitter and deleted my account there also (granted, I had stopped using Twitter long ago, but I still felt compelled to delete my old account there). Then I stared at the screen once more; the heaviness lifted; I felt as if I had just slain some sort of pantomime shadow version of myself that was hand-turning this waterwheel of distraction, but instead of being powered by water, it was powered by cheap dopamine released by this faux feeling of validation elicited from people that I didn’t even care about, only thinking I cared about them because they gave me likes and follows. I felt like I no longer needed to impress or appease anyone, and that made me feel really good. And now I feel like a fuller, more complete version of myself.
To be fair, the whole excising-distractions thing wasn’t really an epiphany moment for me, more of a slow build-up. I had been reading The Pale King for about two months by this point, and had been thinking about these distraction nexuses often during that whole reading period—even before that, this (deleting all social media) was something I had vehemently debated with the angels and demons in my head for years. But maybe staring into the wood was that extra push I needed. And, don’t get me wrong, I wasn't suddenly cured of distraction, as, obviously, when I went to write this essay, we all know what happened (refer back to §2). But I am one step closer to achieving true immersion. I excised some of the distraction nexus, and since then, I have been more productive and more immersive and just in a much better mood overall. And to achieve the first step of immersion, all it took was some basic awareness: awareness of myself wasting away; awareness of myself farming cheap validation yet still feeling invalidated; awareness of myself saying I was going to do something but then just clicking and swiping all over the place instead; and awareness of how embarrassing all this stuff actually is, and not embarrassing in an egocentric “what will people think of me?” type of way (because this distraction nexus is the standard human condition in 2024; i.e., I am not unique in this), but embarrassing in a deeply personal “the hyperaware Chris Fogle-doubling-on-Adderall-esque pure soul version of myself is floating invisible in the room watching me as I allow nefarious external forces to subvert my will whilst tricking me into believing that I am in total control, and they (the aforementioned pure soul version of myself) are crying real soul tears” type of thing—if that makes any sense whatsoever.
What I’m trying to say is, awareness is the first step to true immersion—and becoming immersive might just be the key to enlightenment.
§5
So, circling back to my previous series of questions in §3:
“Why can’t I see beyond the boredom? Is it a me problem? Or is it because we now live in a society wherein it’s harder than ever to focus due to the overabundance of easily accessible distractions? Or is it both?” —Become Immersive, Forrest, 2024, §3.
The answer is: It’s both.
To truly become immersive, you first need to develop the awareness to recognize the distractions in your life, and then you need to excise those distractions with extreme prejudice, and then you need to sit down, realize that you are in control of your own self, and just fucking focus.
And, don’t get me wrong, I’m not pretending that I have mastered this power or even tapped into one iota of its full strength—only that I am aware of it, that I am aware that true enlightenment can only be achieved once I have become immersive. And, even now, with this essay, I am working toward becoming immersive.
§6
“Wonderful, indeed, it is to subdue the mind, so difficult to subdue, ever swift, and seizing whatever it desires. A tamed mind brings happiness.” —The Dhammapada, the Buddha, Ch3. The Mind
Now you’re thinking that this all sounds like New Age nonsense: like, “true enlightenment? What the fuck is this person talking about?” But think about it for a moment, I mean really think about it; think back to a time when you felt truly immersed—what did that feel like?
Was it unpleasant?
Here’s the low-down, the situation that you and I find ourselves in: modern life can be incredibly boring. We are called to account, and accounting is very boring indeed. Whether by choice or by the causal quirks of the universe or by the massive snowball getting bigger and bigger as it rolls down the hill that is our collective decisions up until this very point, we are constantly tasked with assignments that are both tedious and sometimes entirely pointless in the grand scheme of things. Take raking the leafs in your backyard, for example: tedious, boring, could be doing anything else; but it must be done, for whatever reason (maybe you have an HOA [Homeowners Association] and they’re very serious about the yards, maybe you have bad snakes that like to hide in the leafs, maybe your kids keep tripping on the slippery leafs &c. &c.). Take your job, whatever it might be, the same job that you’ve grown so tired of and probably cut corners all over the place because no one seems to notice, the job in which you write code for some soulless corporate overlord or troubleshoot kitchen appliances over the phone or participate in video calls that could have simply been emails instead or drive a mail truck around delivering mail or give massages at the local mall wherein all the shops are closing down and you’re pretty sure black mold has crept into the highest corners of the ceiling or auditing tax returns or whatever. The point I’m trying to make here is that we are constantly tasked with things that we have to do simply to survive, much of it facilitated by the need for money (which is a whole other thing that I’m not getting into right now). And you might be reading this thinking something like, “Well, I didn’t choose to be part of this hellish capitalist system” and other pleas of victimhood, but, NEWS FLASH, you are part of the system, whether you like it or not. You are a cog. Go protest outside a government building or vote for change or whatever, but at the end of the day, you’re coming back home to a place in which rent is always due, you are forced to participate in this system, and if you don’t participate, you will perish (now, if you want to perish, that’s a whole separate thing that I’m not going to get into right now [for the sake of time]), and I’m not just talking about you (although I am using you-pronouns), I’m talking about everyone; and provided you (everyone) intend on existing in this world, you will have to deal with the unjust tedium and boredom that comes along with it. Hell, much like capitalism, we could bemoan our own biology as well; sometimes, even the mere fact that I have to interrupt what I’m doing to go get something to eat, because if not, I will get pissed off and eventually wither away, is unfair and unjust and tedious and boring to me. The whole system, from biology to bureaucracy, is riddled with tedium.
Many of us do these tedious things in a begrudgingly half-assed, bitter kind of way that slowly decomposes our soulstuff and makes us want to die. But, what if we could hyperfocus on demand? What if we could become immersed in this stuff, do it so quickly and efficiently that we don’t even realize that it’s tedious to begin with, then move on to become immersed in something else? Something of our choosing. What if we could become so immersed in whatever we were doing that, whilst doing said things, we didn’t even have the desire to do something else—instead, only being prompted to switch tasks when our current task was truly finished? What if we could become so immersed that we saw past the boredom to the beauty beyond? What if we could just flip this immersion switch on and off at will? What if we could tap into this power of immersion on demand for whatever we wanted?
Nothing would be able to stop us.
§7
This power of immersion need not only be used to endure the tedium of modern life—it can be used for literally anything you want. Want to play Final Fantasy VII? It can be used for that. Calculate Pi? Good for that. Play with your kids? Good for that too. Make your own video game? Very good for that. Clean your entire house? That, too. Read a book? Solve the Riemann Hypothesis? Write your own book. Learn how to fix that weird stutter your car keeps doing. Watch baseball on television without falling asleep. Discover dark matter, or prove it doesn’t exist. Set the world record for longest time spent chewing the same piece of gum. Roll thousands of coins for deposit? Check. Proofread an 8000-word document such as the one you’re reading right now? Can confirm, I did it myself. Stare at a wooden fence for hours? Also, yes, obviously. Teach your cat how to use the human toilet. Tighten literally every screw in your home. Meditate in silence. Listen to Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart without rolling your eyes even once.
I think you get the point.
But beware, for the power of immersion is a double-edged sword and must be wielded with great care.
“He struggled to breathe against the dextrorotated pressure of his ribs, stretching farther and farther to the side, very early one morning, until he felt a flat pop in the upper part of his back and then pain beyond naming somewhere between his shoulder blade and spine. The boy did not cry out or weep but merely sat silent in this tortured posture until his failure to appear for breakfast brought his father upstairs to the bedroom’s door.” —The Pale King, Wallace, 2011, p. 397.
Did you think that I was just going to forget about that kid from §1 who was obsessed with licking every inch of his own body? That boy who sat in silence for hours a day, contorting himself in weird painful ways. Bones creaking softly like slow pressure on wood. Head inches from ripping from the neck as he extends his tongue between his own buttocks. Were you hoping that I would forget because you yourself wanted so badly to forget? Well, if so, you were wrong, because there’s a very important lesson to be learned from the boy who licked his own butthole.
But before we get into that lesson, we first need to answer the question posed at the very beginning of this essay.
Q: What do Shane Drinion, Chris Fogle, and the butthole boy have in common? A: They are all immersive.
But while all three people are immersive, only one of them ends up in the hospital.
The butthole boy is a cautionary tale; while he was able to tap into the powers of immersion, what he chose to use that power on landed him right in the emergency care room. The butthole boy shows us that the power of immersion can be used for both yin and yang and that one needs the awareness to determine what the power of immersion should be used on and for how long it should be used. The butthole boy also shows us that the power of immersion by itself grants neither higher wisdom nor enlightenment; instead, it is one of many tools to be used in the pursuit of higher wisdom and enlightenment, and it should be used with great care.
Hypothetically, if I could flip the immersion switch on and off (which is what I am aspiring to learn how to do here), I could spend all day and night playing Final Fantasy VII, ignoring everything around me while doing so, and I would be happy via the power of true immersion. However, I would be wasting away; I would stop showing up for work, thus I would have no money to pay bills, thus my power would be shut off, thus I would have no Final Fantasy VII to play, and eventually my house would get foreclosed on, and my family would become destitute, and thus we would all starve to death. It’s simple stuff, really, but it needs to be said: immersion must be wielded responsibly.
Be careful not to paralyze yourself with the tremendous power of immersion. Do not forget about your worldly responsibilities; instead, become immersed in them when necessary, but do not forget who you are, and do not become so immersed in yourself that you lose sight of the big picture. There is a balance that must be reached between self and system. And know that immersion can be used on all things, but also know that if you are not able to wield immersion on the boring stuff, then you are not able to wield immersion at all.
Becoming immersive is not only about being able to hyperfocus on pleasurable things, it’s also about being able to hyperfocus on the things that you normally don’t want to focus on: the mundane, tedious, soul-sucking things that we are all pretty much required to do simply to exist in this modern world. The power of immersion makes the unbearable bearable, and thus, when we wield immersion, we are at peace with tedium because it is no longer tedium at all.
There will be times when you are called to account, and during these times, you will want to be able to wield the power of immersion—just make sure you wield it responsibly.
§8
Bad news—there’s no magic spell or secret words or series of numbers that, once recited, grants the power of immersion (but according to David Foster Wallace's notes included in the paperback edition of The Pale King, Chris Fogle was meant to know the series-of-numbers thing, though it never made it into the final manuscript).
The power of immersion cannot be taught; it can only be suggested, and from there, one must mine the power from the depths of the soul and hone the power over time. And, as such, the journey to becoming immersive is a personal one that will differ from person to person. However—and this is important—it is imperative that you start this journey immediately; we are living in an age where the self has been co-opted by soulless media corporations and social media influencers that do not care about you; they have stolen your attention and intend to keep it forever, but it is imperative that you reclaim it; you must reclaim yourself; and if you don’t start this journey soon, it may be too late to start the journey at all. And, again, I am not trying to say that I have become immersive myself—merely that I am aware of the power of immersion and that I aim to become immersive and that I am trying to become immersive even now as I write these words. Everything I do from here on out is in service to becoming immersive. (In fact, it's likely that I am only using you-pronouns because it's easier to get my point across stylistically, and that I am kinda indirectly giving myself a pep talk, because directly addressing myself with first-person singular pronouns all the time starts to feel a little awkward, prose-wise; that is certainly one valid interpretation of what I'm doing here.) And while I can’t give you the magic words or the secret numbers to become immersive, there are a few things I can suggest that might illuminate the path for you. The first step is awareness: awareness that your attention has been stolen from you, awareness that you are not in full control right now but that you can be (and, if you’re a determinist who does not believe in free will, consider your reading of this essay to be your antecedent cause to action). The second step is to read The Pale King in full (half-joking, but it helps in the same vein as the previous parenthetical aside). The third step is to excise the bullshit: foster environments wherein you minimize distractions; turn off your smartphone when you don’t need it because smartphones are a direct line to the corporate distraction nexus; distance yourself from social media or delete it outright, because everything on social media is pantomime (it should be called social mimesis), and it is the primary vector for the distraction mind virus; use only one computer monitor instead of three or four or ten thus making it harder to multitask yourself into distraction; log off the internet once in a while; take a day wherein you use absolutely no electronics but instead just think about stuff real hard; walk a nature trail in full and then do it again; immerse yourself in a daily exercise routine; stop using online services that use predictive algorithms of any kind; and, last but certainly not least, just sit down and focus on the stuff you want and/or need to do, because ultimately, this is all in your head; it’s all mental. All you have to do is WILL IT. Boredom is our enemy, and we wield the knife. The next time you’re sitting there doing something that you really want and/or need to do but find yourself starting to drift or become bored, just lift the knife and tell yourself, “I AM NOT DRIFTING. THIS IS NOT BORING,” and then cut right through the boredom to the beauty beyond. Once you know that you can do this—that it was even an option at all—you are on the path to becoming immersive.
“If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.” —The Pale King, Wallace, 2011, p. 440.
You can reclaim your attention. I know you can, and I know this because I know that I myself can; and if an ADHD-diagnosed high school dropout who still has to do the L-thing with his hand to figure out left from right whose uncle once said quote there is no career path for him other than hobo unquote can do it, then so can you.
I believe in you.
We can become immersive together.
If this essay made you feel something, please let me know via email at f0rrest@pm.me.