all those encounters are supposed to build to. You have thousands of conversations and remember none.
The problem is that the person in the aesthetic phase sees life as possibilities to be experienced and not projects to be fulfilled or ideals to be lived out. He will hover above everything but never land. In the aesthetic way of life, each individual day is fun, but it doesn’t seem to add up to anything.
The theory behind this life is that you should rack up experiences. But if you live life as a series of serial adventures, you will wander about in the indeterminacy of your own passing feelings and your own changeable heart. Life will be a series of temporary moments, not an accumulating flow of accomplishment. You will lay waste to your powers, scattering them in all directions. You will be plagued by a fear of missing out. Your possibilities are endless, but your decision-making landscape is hopelessly flat.
As Annie Dillard put it, how you spend your days is how you spend your life. If you spend your days merely consuming random experiences, you will begin to feel like a scattered consumer. If you want to sample something from every aisle in the grocery store of life, you turn yourself into a chooser, the sort of self-obsessed person who is always thinking about himself and his choices and is eventually paralyzed by self-consciousness.
Our natural enthusiasm trains us to be people pleasers, to say yes to other people. But if you aren’t saying a permanent no to anything, giving anything up, then you probably aren’t diving into anything fully. A life of commitment means saying a thousand noes for the sake of a few precious yeses.
When enough people are going through this phase at once, you end up with a society in which everything is in flux. You end up with what the Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid modernity.” In the age of the smartphone, the friction costs involved in making or breaking any transaction or relationship approach zero. The Internet is commanding you to click on and sample one thing after another. Living online often means living in a state of diversion. When you’re living in diversion you’re not actually deeply interested in things; you’re just bored at a more frenetic pace. Online life is saturated with decommitment devices. If you can’t focus your attention for thirty seconds, how on earth are you going to commit for life?
Such is life in the dizziness of freedom. Nobody quite knows where they stand with one another. Everybody is pretty sure that other people are doing life better. Comparison is the robber of joy.
After several years of pursuing open options, it’s not so much that you lose the thread of the meaning of your life; you have trouble even staying focused on the question. David Foster Wallace’s epic novel Infinite Jest is a description of this distracted frame of mind. It’s about a movie so “fatally entertaining” that everybody becomes a drooling zombie in its trance. The big questions of life have been replaced by entertainment. The novel itself embodies the mind of the terminally distracted, with sentences stringing along and doubling back on one another, thoughts just popping up here and there. In such a world, everybody is buzzingly entertained but not necessarily progressing.
Wallace thought the way to fight all this was to focus your individual attention—through a sort of iron willpower. “Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think,” Wallace told Kenyon College graduates in his famous commencement address. “It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”
But Wallace’s remedy is unrealistic. When you are in your distraction, untethered to actual commitments, focusing your attention is precisely what you cannot do. Your mind is afloat and at the play of prompts. Do not flatter yourself in thinking that you’re brave enough or capable enough to see into the deepest and most important parts of yourself. One of the reasons you are rushing about is because you are running away from yourself.
You know that at some point you should sit down and find some overall direction for your life. But the mind wants to wander from the meaty big questions, which are completely daunting and unanswerable, to the