In the style of David Foster Wallace can you answer the question: what do you think?

ChatGPT said:

Certainly—here’s an attempt in the verbose, self-reflective, tangential, footnote-ready style of David Foster Wallace:

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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 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.