The Spider in the Brain: Infinite Jest and Why Simple Rules Can Beat Complex Reasoning

This essay centers around addiction; while the subject centers around ruinous addictions to physical substances, it can apply to virtually any behavior that forms within us an unwanted compulsion. (For most readers, I would guess digital compulsions are more likely). But it is not just addiction; it is when we must acknowledge under what conditions simple rules will provide better outcomes for ourselves than decisions based on all the complex nuances of the day-to-day.

In the dense and massive tome that is Infinite Jest, author David Foster Wallace explores a variety of ideas, but the narrative centers on, in so much as it centers on anything, Alcoholics Anonymous. Writing the over thousand-page long manuscript chock full of footnotes (that make reading it in print to this day all but a must) was a sober DFW who credited his sobriety to AA.[1] 

One reoccurring theme is smart, overthinking characters being told simple slogans, stupid simple slogans. 

“Your best thinking got you here.”

“Do as you’re told if you want to grow old.”

“Acceptance is the Answer to All My Problems Today”

The first three steps of AA are

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

Urbane educated such as those most likely reading this probably find this quaint or perhaps actively silly. But it, and things like it, do have success.

“To turn my will and life over to the care of cliches. One day at a time. Easy does it. First things first. Courage is fear that has said its prayers. Ask for help. Thy will not mine be done. It works if you work it. Grow or go. Keep coming back.”

The analogy DFW uses is the spider in the for when the mind is hijacked by addiction. The spider waits patiently, tugging the strings in your brain, thinking your thoughts for you, directing your actions not towards your betterment but that of feeding the spider. As it feasts, it also grows. 

“That no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that.”

No matter how smart you are or think you are, and perhaps especially if you are clever, the spider inside your mind always wins. Sure, you can rationally decide in the morning, “I won’t do that again,” with “that” being anything you might regret. But if the temptation is always there sitting, waiting patiently, what are the chances you will eventually give in? Over all the long hours, days, months, years.

What if the choice is in your own hands, and you are constantly weighing costs and benefits to arrive at a no?

If you rely simply on your own thinking, some opportunity, some circumstance, some tragedy will occur, and then you are in the spider’s web. That is why it can’t be you making the decision. Time is long, and only one failure can be a fall into the very precipice you crawled out of. It doesn’t matter if there is a god. Embrace him/her/it as you understand them and make the decision no. Not I shouldn’t. Not I know it is bad for me. Those have holes. Logic could be you, or it could be the spider. Even if it isn’t the spider, it can still lead to it. 

“Disease, exploiting the loose security of Gately’s fever-addled mind, getting ready to fuck with his motives and persuade him to accept Demerol just once, just one last time, for the totally legitimate medical pain.” (he was shot)

It can’t be you. Given free choice, someday you will make the wrong one. A solid and absolute no is a wall without chinks. It has no holes.[2]

The problem with addiction is without reinforcement from those around us, from an imagined higher power, those absolute nos can corrode, as an absolute, absolute bold uppercase hard NO is almost impossible to truly construct, especially if its construction is just the result of our own efforts.

“Poor Me, Poor Me, Pour Me Another Drink”

Like in all things, there is a balance of forces when overcoming addiction. How deep is the perceived precipice? The deeper it is the more afraid of falling into it, the less the chance of relapse. But with this same logic, it can make a minor relapse turn into a major one, telling yourself that with that one sip, you are back fully in the clutches of your addiction. DFW in the book seems to come more on the side of erring towards the chasm being deep as it is properly hard to fear falling into a simple ditch.

“Gately personally is not hot on NA: so many relapses and un-humble returns, so many war stories told with nondisguised bullshit pride, so little emphasis on Service or serious Message; all these people in leather and metal, preening.”

Basically, here, Narcotics Anonymous being much kinder and lenient about those falling off the wagon and experiencing none of the existential dread those committed to AA are shown to be in the book hollows out what it is supposed to accomplish. When you relapse, you aren’t kicked out, but you do essentially need to start again. But self-pity, self-hate, and self-blame, regardless of the circumstances, is to be shunned. In this way, a default forgiveness of oneself when entering back into the fold is all but mandatory. Going to the stop drinking subreddit anytime someone says they just got over a bender from relapsing, the top-voted comment is something along the lines of “forgive yourself and get back on track” or “forgive yourself and go to a meeting”. There is no why, there is no poor me, there is only no. [3]

Absolute prohibitions

I do not drink

I do not smoke

I do not watch TikTok

Are much more powerful than their conditional brethren

I only drink when I am in pain or anxious

I only smoke when I am really stressed

I only watch TikTok when I am too tired to do anything else

These are almost as useful as no rules at all, their subjective nature welcoming you back on the path with a crooked finger

Absolute conditionals can work better

I will only drink if I did not drink the previous day

I will only smoke with cocktails with friends (this likely will encourage more cocktails with friends)

I will only watch TikTok on friday night

That still keeps a door open. Perhaps they are an illusion eroded by time as extra exceptions pile up. The question is one of costs and benefits and if you can keep to an absolute conditional. Perhaps you really can extract benefits without so much cost. Those in AA in Infinite Jest will very much disagree with this, and if you are a hit-rock-bottom-addict who has experienced a life with more rubble than structure, with your primary concern at the moment of your fall being “How can I get more,” then your spider is nothing to be trifled with, and in that case, I would probably agree with DFW. 

Not every compulsion is as dangerous as every other, however. Not every compulsion is equally unhealthy for everyone. Only you really know if you have a problem. That does not mean so long as you do not admit you have a problem then you don’t have one, there is no deception so easy as self-deception. Still, often, as ferociously we deny, we know clearly the truth weighing in the stomach like a stone.

Dr. Karl Hart’s book Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear describes some of the latest neuroscience around drug use. That most users of even hard drugs are not addicts. That addiction is more a function of a bad environment than it is the drugs in question. That, all too often, we mistake addiction as a cause rather than symptom.
Not every user is an abuser. Only you know if your life is worse or better. Be honest with yourself, if you think it is worse, it probably is.

Our environment might lead us to escape. Our escape might further degrade our interactions with our environment. Self-honesty above all is required to know where you are and where you should go.

But it isn’t just in avoiding harmful things but in doing positive things that simple rules can dominate over more complex decision making.

Take exercise. Practically everyone who manages a solid workout routine treats exercise as a given. If we daily weigh the costs and benefits, and we have not yet accustomed ourselves to enjoying exercise we will eventually find enough excuses to slip and fall a little more, a little more, until there is essentially no routine.

Take studying. If we find it painful, it is all too easy for us to put it off, procrastinating with our tasks in our mind, barely even enjoying our procrastination in our anxious half-rest. Simply setting realistic goals we can meet and following them takes away the time we spend unhappily equivocating, allowing both better results and more restful rest.

Take reading. Many I know wish to read more but find it hard to start and easy to decide to put off. Carving out a time as “reading time,” where you make it a simple rule to start reading for at least x# of minutes, is much more likely to be successful than day-to-day justifications fraught with all their excuses, real, imagined, and insufficent.

Really basically anything we want to do more of turning it from a decision to a habit, a rule is likely t greatly increase the chance of success.

A habit, a must-do, will lead us farther down a path than daily intellectual deliberation. Still if we injure our ankle, our rule about running should be on temporary pause. It is hard to navigate when our excuses should override our rules, with the analysis being much the same as that around bad habits. Running, reading, studying a specific subject these are all proximate goals, forgetting why we do them can make us takes steps away from whatever our ultimate goals may be rather than towards them.

Almost everyone uses the excuse “I don’t have time to do X” because it feels better than “I have trouble making myself do X even though I like virtually everyone else waste a lot of my time[4]”. Once again, the key is self-honesty.

Things are complicated, things are always complicated, but it is good to know when it is best to discard dealing with this complexity for simple rules.

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[1] All quotations are from Infinite Jest

[2] “but one way or another, these poor cocky clueless new bastards start gradually drifting away from rabid Activity In The Group, and then away from their Group itself, and then little by little gradually drift away from any AA meetings at all, and then, without the protection of meetings or a Group, in time — oh there’s always plenty of time, the Disease is fiendishly patient — how in time they forget what it was like, the ones that’ve cockily drifted, they forget who and what they are, they forget about the Disease, until like one day they’re at like maybe a Celtics-Sixers game, and the good old Fleet/First Interstate Center’s hot, and they think what could just one cold foamer hurt, after all this sober time, now that they’ve gotten “Well.” Just one cold one. What could it hurt? And after that one, it’s like they’d never stopped, if they’ve got the Disease. And how in a month or six months or a year they have to Come Back In, back to the Boston AA halls and their old Group, tottering, D.T.ing, with their faces hanging down around their knees all over again, or maybe it’s five or ten years before they can get it up to get back In, beaten to shit again, or else their system isn’t ready for the recurred abuse again after some sober time and they die Out There”

[3] “As she’s telling what she sees as etiological truth, even though the monologue seems sincere and unaffected and at least a B+ on the overall AA-story lucidity-scale, faces in the hall are averted and heads clutched and postures uneasily shifted in empathetic distress at the look-what-happened-to-poor-me invitation implicit in the tale, the talk’s tone of self-pity itself less offensive (even though plenty of these White Flaggers, Gately knows, had personal childhoods that made this girl’s look like a day at Six Flags Over the Poconos) than the subcurrent of explanation, an appeal to exterior Cause that can slide, in the addictive mind, so insidiously into Excuse that any causal attribution is in Boston AA feared, shunned, punished by empathic distress. The Why of the Disease is a labrynth it is strongly suggested all AAs boycott, inhabited as the maze is by the twin minotaurs of Why Me? and Why Not?, a.k.a. Self-Pity and Denial, two of the smily-faced Sergeant at Arms’ more fearsome aides de camp. The Boston AA ‘In Here’ that protects against a return to ‘Out There’ is not about explaining what caused your Disease. It’s about a goofily simple practical recipe for how to remember you’ve got the Disease day by day and how to treat the Disease day by day, how to keep the seductive ghost of a bliss long absconded from baiting you and hooking you and pulling you back Out and eating your heart raw and (if you’re lucky) eliminating your map for good. So no whys or wherefores allowed. In other words, check your head at the door. Though it can’t be conventionally enforced, this, Boston AA’s real root axiom, is almost classically authoritarian, maybe even proto-Fascist.”

[4] Myself very much included, at least half.