The first chapter of Infinite Jest is a great portrayal of cancellation/struggle session: smart sensitive repressed striver white boy (“Hal”—as in the supercomputer in 2001 & the prince in the Henriad) feels as tho he’s communicating clearly to smug midwit college admissions officers—performing accessible compliant erudition for the audience he looks down on but seeks understanding & approval from—& they react as if he’s having a seizure, & restrain & judge him, & frame his alleged chimp-out in condescending “oh you poor victim” ways, & his literally & figuratively cucked paternal figures try to make simpering but well-intentioned excuses for him while he gets taken away by “caring” “impartial” “experts” in “childhood psychological development,” instead of just letting him play expert tennis & privately think (which is all he was applying to college for). Hal’s well-honed coping strategy is to just stay limp & silent & keep his face intentionally blank while they grill him about his views, & still they find ways to freak out at & institutionalize him. He thinks back to his overbearing mom’s flailing hysterical behavior, & his prior stints being shunted off to apathetic Dominican male nurses, & his one brief adventure, as US jets bomb Canada for sheltering & fomenting freakish disability-rights wheelchair-terrorists who voluntarily amputated themselves to affirm their activist neo-identities & who unleashed infantilizing viral TikTok fads on our overly-diversified population—Muslim fifth-columnists helped spread it—as vengeance against our charismatic brash funny-talking celebrity president who combined closeted masculinist right-wing nationalism with crunchy health-nut neuroticism to force America First trade deals on our hemisphere so we could deport our trash to them (after he briefly flirted with germaphobic hypochondria lockdowns). This was published in the mid-1990s btw, & among many other prescient bits—eg everyone brings up the chapter on how everyone uses video calls but always turns off their cameras & screens—it foregrounds weed as the worst & most omnipresent drug, precisely because (on utilitarian grounds) it’s the hardest to attack. It’s the main link between the two storylines: the teen strivers at the tennis academy, who are addicted to external validation; & the losers at the halfway house down the hill from the academy, who are addicted to internal obliteration. Both emptily fear internal motivation & external obliteration. Later it’s implied that one of the many “supplemental” essays Hal applied with was about how “modern” heroes (eg monster-of-the-week TV protagonists, like the Law & Order cops) cultivate *action* to create Sisyphean metanarratives, & how postmodern heroes—eg seasonally-plotted TV ensembles, like The Wire’s bureaucrats—cultivate *reaction* to mediate between metanarratives; he wistfully theorizes that now post-postmodern heroes—heroes of posting—must cultivate *inaction* in response to all these reactive claims by mediators with no message of their own who all claim to be acting on behalf of others (ie we have to simply turn away from their empty shrill administrative claims). He writes of modern heroism as “lying flat” while schoolmarms fecklessly buzz around him, & of police chiefs who do the same when civil rights lawyers come hectoring them about Mirandizing suspects, & so forth; not exaggerating BTW, this is all explicitly in the text, even the call-out of shrewish civil rights lawyers who care about supposed Miranda rights. This understanding of heroism is explicitly repeated several times. Eg (spoiler alert for something 30 years old) the climax is the two main characters—prep school Hal & a reformed-addict staffer at a nearby halfway house named Don Gately, who have never actually crossed paths but persistently converged toward each other—lying flat & mute in hospital beds next to each other while communing with ghosts of their forefathers & ignoring the scolds & parasites who flock around them, so they can dream of & plot ritualized human sacrifice behind enemy lines to kill off utilitarianism before the Canadians can puppet the bodies of our patriarchs to deploy the utility monster omega device on us in the name of giving us “death with dignity” by which they mean letting us let ourselves get pleasured pathetically into early graves. Hal & Gately unfortunately fail—because the restless ghost of the corpse they were trying to grave-rob wasn’t able to “lie flat”—& thus doom Canada to bloody vengeful conquest by the surviving human spirit. & the reason that Hal can’t speak & that his dad is dead & that this utility weapon exists is that Hal’s dad learned to notice that Hal never actually said anything for himself—ie noticed that Hal just performed & parroted for attention & approval from frigid shrews—& so Hal’s dad refused to listen to anything that came out of Hal’s mouth; instead the father comes up with ever more comical plots to shut up his own son’s bullshit empty-calorie wordcelery so they can get past that vapid preening & really interact, ultimately by hospitalizing Hal in such a way as to render him physically incapable of speech (even though this causes continent-wide war) so that Hal’s inner monologues can just be for himself, so that Hal can finally develop his insides instead of just peacocking, & so that Hal can thus finally relate authentically to his dad—eg by playing his father’s ghost in games of tennis against possessed meat-puppets of his dad’s other pupils, for the love of the game, after all his hopes of gaming college admissions etc have been destroyed. In the only real flashback of Hal’s dad’s life, we learn that he—James—likewise learned this understanding of heroism from his own failed actor father. Hal’s grandpa tells Hal’s dad at length that the point of tennis is to respect the ball more than either player: the ball will smoothly bounce wherever it must, without leaving its flesh all over the court, & will outlast you, unless you likewise learn how to follow paths of least action… how to move like someone who doesn’t, like Marlon Brando, rather than staying frenetically still, like Brando’s fans. James’ best friend Lyle likewise tells everyone to live by this wisdom, to lie flat, to meditate forever, to stop underestimating the power of objects, to placidly drink the sweat of others. Anyway James then tries to impress his failed actor father (Hal’s grandpa) by becoming a failed film-maker who makes vapid cutesy peacocking empty-calorie postmodern “concept films” while his wife (Hal’s mom) cucks him with Canadian fifth-columnist simps, until James makes one film to try to communicate authentically with his son—to break thru his mommy neuroses by having the hottest woman in the world roleplay as mommy towards the camera in a crib, rocking it back & forth & cooing over the viewer & telling you that she forgives you & everything will be ok; this film is what terminally breaks the brain of everyone who watches it, by giving them all the validation they so desperately crave, so anyone who sees it will compulsively loop it forever, soiling themselves & starving so their screens can keep telling them that they’re such good little boys & hot mommy is ever so sorry if anyone said otherwise. That’s when he decides his work is done & winds up dead & the Canadians who cucked him steal it & evangelize this work to Americans to smother us on our sweets as vengeance for being such anhedonic treat-addled gluttons who deport our toxic waste into their thus-ruined country. BTW the Canadians are actually independence-minded Quebeckers who hate how this has also turned their country into an uncultured anywhere cosmopolitan zone. & the sterile “hot mommy” actress winds up donning the veil in protest against the male gaze. Also when Don Gately’s rendered physically incapable of speech & hospitalized—for trying to save his very misguided halfway-house wards from all the psyops of the modern world, from drugs thru Canadian spies trying to forcibly spread utilitarian propaganda—he at first resents how others use this as an excuse to finally talk out their problems at him, & how they seem unable to even notice his incapacity, but then he learns to take power from his inability to be moved, ie from his ability to fully accept his fate as the rock upon which they can land, without painkillers when he’s in pain, without distractions when he’s in thought, finally forced to placidly feel & think for all the times he drugged himself (mainly with painkillers when he wasn’t even in pain) into frenetic inaction. Maybe women’s intuition is real, given how they all stridently hated this “problematic” book despite not even reading plot summaries of it. Even most guys just interpreted it as about being sincere & practicing moderation.