“Look at all the lonely people,” the Beatles sang in their haunting “Eleanor Rigby.”
You’ll find them not only in bars but, much more these days, glued to their TV screens and 24/7 social media, hungry to connect.
It’s the true addiction that plagues us.
Cultural critic Ted Goia—12 books—writes perceptibly of our mania to whittle our way out of our daily ennui via screen subservience, unwitting of the corporate entities feeding our habit:
“No drug cartel makes as much money as the screen-and-app companies. It’s not even close.
“… screen media providers will never tell you the truth about the screens themselves. These interfaces appear—falsely!—as innocent and without agenda. But just follow the money trail, and it’s not hard to figure out what’s really going on.
“The richest people on the planet are the ones who control our screens. That doesn’t happen by coincidence.
“If we abandon ourselves completely to the tech (as many now do), we become pawns in the corporate agenda to monetize us—at a tremendous cost in loneliness, depression, and social disconnection” (“David Foster Wallace Tried to Warn Us,” Substack, Sept. 26, 2025).
Goia quotes the late literary genius, David Foster Wallace, who didn’t own a TV, knowing his susceptibility to its mind-numbing allure:
“Entertainment’s chief job is to make you so riveted by it that you can’t tear your eyes away, so the advertisers can advertise.…At a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by by people who do not love us but want our money(Interview with David Lipsky, Rolling Stone, 1993).
By the way, I’m planning to read everything Wallace wrote—the short stories, the essays, his magnus opus, Infinite Jest and unfinished The Pale King.
Prescient and mesmerizing, he deserves nothing less.
rj
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Brimmings: up from the well 