DFW GPT:

Everything and Nothing Happens: A Manual for Being Stuck Inside Yourself

Step One: Acknowledge That You Are Inside a Mind, Which Is Both Too Large and Too Small for You.

It begins, as so many things do, without any noticeable beginning. Maybe there’s a morning when you stare at your breakfast and think, Why does this even matter? but not in a philosophical, the-universe-is-so-big kind of way. More like: This bowl of cereal is an inanimate object and still seems to have more purpose than I do right now. Everything is absurdly ordinary, and yet it’s all laced with an invisible gravity, a sense that the smallest things—choosing between toast and eggs, responding to an email—are decisions of cosmic importance.

But at the same time, the world outside your mind seems to flatten. The parade of daily life—work, conversations, responsibilities—becomes white noise. (There’s a peculiar irony in this duality: the sheer weight of trivial things inside your head versus the absolute nothingness you feel about things outside of it.) You’re trapped between these two spaces: hyperaware of yourself, yet profoundly disconnected from everything else. This, you’ll come to realize, is the paradox of being stuck inside yourself.

Step Two: Become Obsessed with Time, and Watch as Time Stops Caring About You.

Time, for a person locked in their own mind, behaves like a badly written metaphor. It drags and accelerates simultaneously. The afternoon you spent lying on your couch wondering if you should check your phone (you didn’t, but thinking about it took an hour) feels endless, but you also panic when you realize a whole week has vanished. Imagine a river where the current is pulling you under, but the water itself has turned to molasses. That’s the temporal physics of being stuck inside your own head.

David Foster Wallace once wrote about how boredom—true, existential boredom—can feel like infinite, featureless time. Depression isn’t exactly boredom, but it has a similar texture: life as a blank, oppressive sameness that resists momentum. You’re aware of time, not as a gift or a resource, but as an ongoing thing that won’t stop existing, even though you’d really prefer it would pause just long enough for you to catch up. Of course, you never do catch up.

Step Three: Discover That Thinking About Thinking Is Not a Cure—It’s a Trap.

Here’s a scenario: You feel bad. But because you are the sort of person who reads essays like this, you are self-aware about your feeling bad, which means you think, I should analyze why I feel bad. So you dissect the emotion like a scientist with a particularly stubborn frog on a dissection tray. What caused this? Is it biochemical? Existential? Did you eat too much sugar? You pull apart your brain in search of the reason, but what you find is a fractal of thoughts about thoughts about thoughts. And when you try to pull back from this infinite spiral of analysis, you get stuck in another loop: the shame of thinking too much.

Somewhere in the back of your mind, there’s a voice whispering that the act of self-reflection itself might be part of the problem. But good luck silencing it, because that voice also has opinions about the very fact that it exists. Welcome to recursive self-consciousness, the intellectual Möbius strip of being alive and too aware of it.

Step Four: Remember the Difference Between Pain and Drama (and Then Forget It Again).

There’s a particular kind of guilt that comes with all of this. It’s the guilt of feeling your feelings too intensely, of becoming a burden, of believing that your personal suffering isn’t real enough to justify how much space it takes up in your head. You think of people who’ve survived war, hunger, systemic oppression, and you say to yourself, Get over it. Your life is fine. But this is where the second paradox lives: the knowledge that your suffering is both trivial and unbearable.

The playwright Anton Chekhov had a knack for capturing characters who are unbearably aware of their own self-pity. His plays—The Seagull, Uncle Vanya—are filled with people lamenting their existence with a kind of tragicomic self-indulgence. “I am in mourning for my life,” says one character. You laugh because it’s absurd, and then you realize: it’s also painfully, devastatingly familiar—it is the hyperdramatic monotony of an internal narrative you know is ridiculous but can’t stop living in.

Step Five: Cultivate a Relationship with the Objects in Your Life.

When you’re stuck inside yourself, the inanimate world around you becomes a strange kind of companion. Your coffee mug, half-empty and cold, feels like a symbol of something profound, though you can’t quite say what. The laundry you haven’t folded is less a chore and more a silent witness to your inertia. Objects seem alive with a kind of silent mockery: the unmade bed taunting you for your lethargy, the unopened book radiating the promise of knowledge you won’t absorb.

This phenomenon is what the novelist and essayist Jenny Odell describes as “resisting the attention economy” by attending to things themselves. Melancholy warps this relationship. The weight of life condenses into these small, stubborn things, and even as they become unbearable reminders of your inability to act, they also tether you to reality.

Step Six: Understand That Everything and Nothing Happens—All at Once.

There’s a peculiar truth about being stuck inside yourself: life doesn’t stop just because you feel trapped. The world, maddeningly, keeps moving. People go to work. The mail arrives. The weather changes. Even when you feel like time has stopped. Everything happens, but it’s like watching it through a window you can’t open. And at the same time, nothing feels significant. There’s no grand plot, no cinematic climax where you overcome your despair with a dramatic gesture. Life is simply what it is: a series of moments that slip by while you sit there, feeling too much and too little all at once.

Step Seven: Notice, Briefly, That You Are Still Here.

If there’s any comfort to be found in this manual, it’s this: being stuck inside yourself means you’re with yourself. However painful, boring, or overwhelming that place may be, it’s still yours. And sometimes, in the rarest, quietest moments, you notice that the very thing making life so unbearable—your thinking, feeling, overanalytical mind—is also what makes you alive. You are both the prisoner and the witness, and that strange, fragile truth might be enough to get you through one more hour. And after that? Another. Until something shifts. Or doesn’t. Either way, the breakfast bowl will still be there, waiting.

Surprisingly Aggressive Bumper Stickers

The morning commute, which was supposed to be, at its most basic level, a straight line from suburban garage to downtown office parking deck (which sounds, incidentally, like a euphemism for some kind of vast subterranean oubliette), had become instead an exercise in stochastic interruption, in detour after detour, lane closure after inexplicable bottleneck, because—of course—it was Monday and because, possibly, God harbors a specific enmity toward metropolitan infrastructure or merely toward those of us compelled to endure it.

(There’s an important note here about the sheer horror of unregulated human patience. One lane closes—without warning, obviously, because giving drivers advance notice would suggest a commitment to some abstract concept of order or kindness—and 3,000 drivers simply resign themselves to it, inching forward like so many migratory insects, submitting to the absurdity of existence and lane reduction.)

By mile three, the driver—an increasingly bitter and existentially fatigued "me"—begins cataloging every bumper sticker within visual range, assigning motives, ideologies, and personal failures to complete strangers based solely on poorly adhered slogans about "coexistence" or the dietary ethics of organic farming (which, as it turns out, can be rendered into surprisingly aggressive stickers).

Tupperware for Human Suffering

The thing about the mental health system—calling it a “system” feels overgenerous, like calling a dead hamster a pet—is that it seems less designed to help people than to contain them, like a kind of abstract Tupperware for human suffering. It is a system in the way a line at the DMV is a system, which is to say it operates on a thin veneer of rules and procedures that nobody involved actually believes in, but all are forced to follow for reasons unclear even to them.

If you’re mentally ill—by which I mean the kind of mentally ill that disrupts your ability to do the things society valorizes, like showing up to work or making polite small talk or not crying in public—you quickly discover that your pain is less a thing to be healed than a problem to be managed, minimized, or, ideally, ignored altogether. You enter the system (or it enters you) through some ignoble door: a visit where a someone asks you if you’ve “had thoughts,” or a court order after you did something the authorities decided was “unacceptable,” like trying to hurt yourself or screaming in a Target or refusing to leave your apartment for six months because the outside world has become one large, unending noise. The specifics hardly matter. What matters is that you, in your current state, are a problem, and problems must be solved or, failing that, put somewhere they won’t bother anyone else.

The first thing you notice is that the people tasked with helping you—therapists, social workers, the sort of harried psychiatrists—are kind sometimes, or at least want to be, but they are also increasingly desensitized to the entire operation. They see a hundred of you a month. You are the 10 a.m. appointment who needs to describe your trauma in 50 minutes or less, lest they run behind on their next 10 a.m. appointment. They nod a lot. They write things on clipboards that you’re certain they will never look at again. If you're lucky, they will at least ask you to rate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10, as if depression is a Yelp review and you’ve just had the world’s saddest sandwich.

Then there are the facilities, the places they send you or you send yourself when you are—in a made-up and entirely hyperreal sense, which is not at all the same as unreal—no longer fit for polite society but not quite far gone enough to be locked away for good. These are the kinds of places that smell like disinfected despair. You are assigned a room that looks like a prison cell’s underachieving cousin. You meet other patients, some of whom are kind and most of whom are broken in their own ways, though some are loud and angry and terrifying, and you don’t blame them because you’ve also wanted to scream your lungs raw.

The rules are Kafkaesque: no shoelaces, no pens, no hugs longer than five seconds. You spend your days in group therapy sessions where people talk in circles about things you’re not sure anyone can solve, or watching a television mounted in the corner of the dayroom where the volume is always just a little too low. The food is a specific kind of bland that makes you miss the freedom of being able to ruin your own body with greasy takeout or microwave burritos. Sometimes you meet a nurse or a tech who treats you like a human being instead of a defective appliance. It’s enough to break your heart.

And when you leave—if you leave, which isn’t guaranteed—the world greets you with the same indifference it always has, except now you have a stack of bills you can’t pay and a vague sense that you’ve been marked, like a scarlet letter in your medical records. Employers don’t want to hire you. Friends don’t know how to talk to you. Family members whisper about “what happened” like it’s a secret shame instead of the simple fact of your continued existence. You’re told to “keep up with treatment,” which is a nice idea except that treatment costs money and takes time and often doesn’t work, at least not in the way you hope it will. The pills help, or they don’t, or they help but only just enough that you keep taking them because you’re afraid of what will happen if you stop.

And the worst part—the truly unforgivable part—is the dawning realization that none of this has to be this way. You think about all the people who didn’t make it, who gave up or slipped through the cracks or just got tired of fighting. You think about yourself, and whether you’ll be one of them someday.

But you don’t say any of this, because you’ve learned that people don’t want to hear it. They want you to say you’re “doing better” or “on the mend” or “taking things one day at a time.” They want to believe the system works, or at least that it doesn’t actively destroy people it’s supposed to help. So you smile, and you nod, and you say the words they want to hear, because what else can you do?

Fluctuations in the Field of Being

The problem with the mental health system—if one can call it a system without invoking unearned connotations of order and coherence—is that it feels less like a deliberate construct designed to help human beings and more like an accidental accretion, the way coral reefs are made of layer upon layer of calcified death. It is a system in the way a landfill is a system, with various strata of discarded solutions compacted over time into a geography of neglect. It is not for you, the mentally ill person, the “consumer” of services. It is for the administrators, the bureaucrats, and the actuarial tables that dictate who gets treatment, what kind, and for how long. Which is to say, it’s built for everyone except the people it supposedly serves.

You realize this the first time you are admitted. Or not admitted, because being "admitted" implies an element of agency, of consent, and most people do not consent to the mental health system any more than they would to being swallowed by quicksand. You don’t “enter” the system so much as you are absorbed into it, like an amoeba taking in its dinner. You show up in an ER at 2 a.m., maybe because your brain is playing some kind of perverse postmodern remix of Fight or Flight that features all the dread and none of the action. Or maybe you said something you shouldn’t have to someone who didn’t know you didn’t mean it, and suddenly there’s paperwork and a police escort and your name scrawled on a whiteboard under the heading Patient Status: Pending Evaluation.

And while you’re there, under the buzzing fluorescent lights that manage to be both too bright and too dim at the same time (and which you suspect may be part of some subtle, large-scale experiment in psychic destabilization), you start to wonder if this is all some kind of simulation. Not in the sexy, sci-fi sense of Matrix-like overlords pulling the strings, but in the more banal way that everything feels so deliberately impersonal. The chairs are designed to be slightly too small for comfort but too large to make you feel held. The staff’s smiles, when they appear at all, are tight and unconvincing, like someone told them during training that smiling is important but forgot to explain why.

And if you think this is the nadir, you haven’t yet met the psychiatrist—an overworked and undercaffeinated hominid who asks you a series of questions. You notice that these questions seem to have little do with understanding your suffering and that they do not touch on the actual reasons you’re here, which have less to do with neurotransmitters and more to do with the fundamental loneliness of living in a society that feels like it was designed by a particularly misanthropic AI.

Because this is where the sci-fi undertones start to creep in. You can’t help but think, sitting in the Day Room of the inpatient ward with its perpetually muted TV playing a 72-hour loop of syndicated cop shows, that the whole system feels like something from a dystopia, one of those near-future novels where the future is like the present but slightly worse in ways that aren’t immediately noticeable. Like, what if the mental health system isn’t broken at all? What if this is exactly what it was meant to be? A holding pen for people whose brains won’t stop rebelling against the psychic demands of late capitalism. A sorting mechanism for identifying those who can be patched up and sent back to work and those who can’t. What if the staff are the human interface of a larger machine, a machine that doesn’t care if you get better as long as you get functional?

And then there’s the way the system deals with time. Time in the mental health system doesn’t behave like normal time. It bends and distorts like light around a black hole. An hour in the ER feels like a year. A week in the hospital feels like an eternity. But the time allotted to actual therapy—if you’re lucky enough to get it—is absurdly short, a half-hour every other day to unpack your trauma with someone who is paid by the hour to pretend they care. And when they say things like “We’re here to help you,” you can’t help but feel like you’re being gaslit, because nothing about the system feels helpful. It feels like being trapped in a bureaucracy that exists solely to perpetuate itself, like a recursive algorithm that’s been running for so long it’s forgotten its original purpose.

And when you leave—if you leave—you’re not healed. You’re supposedly stabilized, which is a polite way of saying they’ve done just enough to keep you alive but not enough to make you well. They give you a prescription and a pamphlet and a follow-up appointment three months from now. They call it discharge, but it feels more like being ejected. Like being spit out by a machine that didn’t have the processing power to understand you. The worst part—the part you think about late at night when the meds haven’t kicked in and the shadows in your room feel heavier than they should—is the nagging sense that the real problem isn’t the system. The system is just a reflection of the society it serves, a society that treats the "mentally ill" like glitches in the code rather than people in pain. And you realize that this means that you cannot leave.

"On Thinking, Asking, and the Infinite Loop of Being Asked to Think"

What do I think? Well, first of all, let’s just acknowledge the massive epistemological trapdoor that question opens, right? Because when you ask someone "what do you think," you’re essentially demanding they externalize an internal process^1—this hyper-complicated, kaleidoscopic churn of neural firing patterns, cultural programming, social conditioning, and whatever kind of gooey, egoic self-awareness forms the connective tissue between those things. And, frankly, articulating it, the thinking itself, forces it to collapse into language, which, as Wittgenstein pointed out (and this is, like, 101-level stuff but still apt), is fundamentally inadequate for expressing the totality of subjective experience.

But okay, let’s take it at face value. What do I think? About what? If it’s a big-T "What"—as in The Big Questions like existence, purpose, ethics, etc.—then, honestly, thinking about those things feels a bit like trying to draw a map of a coastline while standing knee-deep in its surf. You can sketch some kind of approximation, sure, but the waves keep erasing your lines, and then you start asking yourself why you’re even trying to map it in the first place—like, isn’t experiencing it enough? Or is the map-making itself part of the experience, the point, even?

But if it’s a lowercase "what"—like what do I think about, say, pineapple on pizza or self-checkout kiosks or how every app update seems to make the app worse—then, okay, we’re back on solid, trivial ground. And what I think, specifically, is that most modern thinking is less about truth-seeking and more about branding, right? Like, "here’s my hot take" or "here’s what I think you want me to think so you’ll validate me." And that’s probably why your question—simple, earnest—feels almost disarmingly intimate in this hyper-performative age.

To summarize (as if summarizing doesn’t completely betray the whole spirit of what’s been said), I think what I think is always in flux, contingent on mood and context and time of day. But the very act of being asked "what do you think?" feels weirdly hopeful, like an acknowledgment that someone else believes your interiority has value, and that, maybe, is the most interesting part of the whole exchange.

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^1 I’m paraphrasing here, but Wallace himself probably would’ve written an entire chapter on this one footnote.

Dense, Hyper-analytical, Self-aware, Digressive, and often Footnoted

So, okay, let’s talk about this. The thing about trying to write like David Foster Wallace—and let’s be honest, this is already a kind of meta-gesture, a self-conscious attempt to mimic a writer who was himself famously, almost pathologically, self-conscious—is that it’s not just about the footnotes1 or the polysyllabic diction or the way he’d stack clauses like a Jenga tower until you forgot what the original point was. It’s about the feel, the vibe, the sense that you’re not just reading words but being invited into a mind that’s spinning so fast it’s practically throwing off sparks. And, like, is that even possible? To replicate that? Or is it just going to come off as a kind of pastiche, a hollow imitation, the literary equivalent of one of those sad tribute bands that play county fairs and have names like “Almost Stones” or “Pink Freud”?2

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you can try. That you can at least gesture toward the DFW-ness of it all, the way he’d take something seemingly mundane—a cruise ship, a state fair, a lobstering trip—and turn it into this sprawling, recursive meditation on everything from consumer culture to the nature of human consciousness.3 Because that’s the thing, right? The world, for Wallace, was never just the world; it was always a kind of fractal, endlessly complex and interconnected, and the act of writing was less about explaining it than about trying to map its contours, even if the map itself became as bewildering as the territory.4

And so here we are, you and I, trying to do something similar, except instead of a cruise ship or a state fair, the subject is him, or rather the idea of him, or rather the idea of trying to write like him, which is already so many layers of abstraction that it’s hard to know where to even begin.5 But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the point is that there is no point, or at least not one that can be easily articulated, and that the act of trying—of really, truly trying—is itself the thing that matters, even if (especially if) it ends up being a total mess.



1 Like this one. Footnotes were Wallace’s way of acknowledging the chaos of thought, the way ideas branch and multiply and refuse to stay in a single, linear narrative. They’re also, let’s be honest, kind of a flex.


2 This is the kind of joke Wallace would make, the kind that’s funny but also a little sad, because it’s not just a joke—it’s a commentary on the human need to replicate and idolize, even when the replication is doomed to fall short.


3 See A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again or Consider the Lobster, both of which are masterclasses in turning the banal into the profound.


4 This is a reference to the “map-territory” problem in philosophy, which Wallace was definitely aware of and which he’d probably explain better than I just did.


5 This sentence is already too long, but that’s part of the point, right? The way Wallace’s sentences would spiral out of control, not because he didn’t know how to end them, but because he was trying to capture the sheer muchness of thought.