Infinite Jest. From Peter Allen Clark.

My memories of the 90s are sparse, because that was when I was born. Like me, David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest came into the world in 1996 and grew up in the eruptive age of smartphones, social media, and personal computers.

This bland and self-centered observation makes the following point — the times in which the work was written are radically different from when I finished the novel, which was no more than a month ago. Yet, as Tom Bissell writes in the forward to the 20th Anniversary edition of Infinite Jest, Wallace’s ideas about addiction, worship, and entertainment have only expanded in importance with the ever-totalizing reach of technology and leisure.

Millenials had box televisions, cassettes, and cartridges. I, a borderline member of Generation Z (or a “post-millenial”), have YouTube, console video games, and music streaming. Whereas the TV generation was subject to the content that companies chose to display on their screens, the post-Millenials have been given near-infinite control over what we consume. In fact, what companies of the 21st century have started to monetize is consumer choice in and of itself. Constantly competing for our frenetically thin attention, companies offer us order in the digital sea of chaos via this choice, and therefore personal identity.

Despite these changes, we now have the worst opioid crisis in American history. The prevalence of mental illness is rising. We elected Donald Trump.

And speaking of Trump (I would not be the first to make the comparison to Infinite Jest’s slime-spewing President Johnny Gentle), let’s talk about cartoons. I would argue that TV shows have changed quite a bit in purpose. The cartoons that Millenials watched, not just the literal Saturday morning cartoons but also goofy sitcoms and sickly sincere melodramas, served as purely entertainment and thus as a harmless escape from life.

Video content now, whether it’s Netflix TV shows or YouTube vlogs or 30-sec Twitter clips, or at least the way we interact with that content, has largely moved away from the raison d’être, that is, to amuse.

Even the silliest content seems to always have an underlying seriousness. Look at shows like Bojack Horseman or Rick and Morty, in which cartoons are our modes for speaking about depression and loneliness. Look at internet memes, which give young people an unexpected but importantly comfortable medium for expressing their anxieties. Content has become strikingly self-conscious.