Choose It or Change It: The Infinite Jest of Your Own Damn Life

My favorite book is David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. I reread it about once every two years and, like the Terry Gilliam jaunt The Fisher King, tend to get something new out of it with each dance. This go round had yet another life lesson smack me in the head like a boot thrown from a balcony.

There is a quietly devastating idea floating around in the air like cigarette smoke in a 1980s bowling alley:

You either change it or you choose it.

That’s it.
Two options.

Not three.
Not seven with a therapist-approved spectrum of emotional nuance.
Not a 400-page explanation with footnotes, cross-references, and a Netflix docuseries.

Just two.

Change it. Or choose it.

And if you don’t change it?

Congratulations.
You chose it.

This realization hits people with roughly the same emotional force as realizing halfway through Infinite Jest that the footnotes have footnotes and that David Foster Wallace is basically daring you to keep going like a sadistic tennis coach screaming across the net while you gasp for oxygen.

Because once you accept the rule—change it or choose it—a lot of comforting bullshit collapses.

Suddenly your life isn’t a mysterious storm you got caught in.

It’s a series of decisions you kept renewing like a streaming subscription you forgot to cancel.

The Comfort of Pretending You’re Trapped

Most people live their lives like residents of the halfway house in Infinite Jest—sitting around explaining their circumstances in long, intricate speeches that make it sound like they’re trapped in some elaborate psychological escape room.

“My job sucks but the market is tough.”
“My relationship is exhausting but relationships take work.”
“I hate my commute but that’s just city life.”
“My boss is a micromanaging goblin but what can you do?”

And look—some of these things are real constraints.

Life is not a Pixar movie where a ukulele starts playing and suddenly everyone can open a cupcake bakery in Portland.

But most people aren’t trapped.

They’re comfortable enough to stay miserable.

Which is a different thing entirely.

It’s like the Entertainment cartridge in Infinite Jest—the movie so hypnotically pleasurable that anyone who watches it becomes incapable of doing anything else.

Except instead of bliss, the entertainment most people are addicted to is familiar dissatisfaction.

They sit there watching it.

Over.
And over.
And over.

Complaining about the plot while refusing to turn off the television.

Your Morning Is a Series of Choices

Let’s take something simple: your morning.

Your alarm goes off.

Immediately, a decision tree opens up.

You can get up.
You can hit snooze.
You can exercise.
You can scroll your phone like a dopamine-starved raccoon rummaging through digital garbage.
You can eat a decent breakfast.

Or you can slam coffee and rage like a caffeinated raccoon.

Every one of these is a choice.

Even the ones you pretend aren’t.

Especially those.

“I’m just not a morning person.”

No.

You are a person who repeatedly chooses the behavior of someone who hates mornings.

Which is fine.

But own it.

Because every morning you hit snooze like it owes you money, you’re casting a vote for the life you currently have.

You’re shaping your day the way a tennis player shapes a rally—every swing affecting the next shot.

Except most people play tennis with their own lives like they’re drunk spectators wandering onto the court.

Ball hits them in the face.

They complain about the ball.

Then they wander back into position and wait for the next one.

Your Job Is a Choice (Yes, Even That One)

Now let’s talk about the big one.

Your job.

Everyone hates talking about this because jobs come with mortgages, insurance, retirement plans, and the subtle terror of adult life.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth:

If you hate your job and you stay, you are choosing that job.

You may be choosing it for rational reasons.

Security.
Predictability.
Healthcare.
Your kids.

But it is still a choice.

The world is full of people who talk about their jobs like prisoners describing their sentences.

“I’ve got twelve more years.”
“Only six more until retirement.”
“My boss is killing me.”

No.

Your boss is not killing you.

You are trading hours of your life for stability.

Which, again, may be a perfectly rational trade.

But call it what it is.

Because once you acknowledge it’s a choice, something interesting happens.

You stop being a victim.

You become a negotiator.

You start asking questions.

How bad is this job really?
What would it take to leave?
What would I trade to change it?

And that’s when life stops being a miserable treadmill and starts becoming something closer to the tennis academy in Infinite Jest—a brutal but honest training ground where improvement requires the horrifying act of taking responsibility for your own swings.

Relationships Are Choices Too

Here’s another grenade people hate hearing.

Relationships are also choices.

You are not trapped in them by cosmic forces.

If someone in your life is consistently making you miserable and you stay, you have chosen that misery.

Now before everyone loses their minds, let’s acknowledge reality.

Leaving relationships can be complicated.

Finances.
Children.
History.
Emotional gravity.

But complexity does not eliminate choice.

It only makes the choice harder.

Think about the addicts in Infinite Jest sitting in those recovery meetings.

They all tell elaborate stories about why they used.

Stress.
Loneliness.
Trauma.
Circumstances.

And those things matter.

But recovery starts the moment someone says:

“I chose it.”

That moment is terrifying because it strips away the most addictive substance humans possess.

The story that we had no control.

Complaining Is Emotional Fast Food

Complaining is the emotional equivalent of junk food.

It tastes incredible.
It’s immediately satisfying.
And if you make a habit of it, it slowly destroys you.

Complaining gives you the warm glow of participation without the risk of action.

You get to narrate your dissatisfaction like a sports commentator describing a terrible game.

“This commute is brutal.”
“This place is a nightmare.”
“This city is insane.”

But narrating a game is not the same as playing it.

Complaining feels like agency.

It’s actually anesthesia.

It numbs the part of your brain that might otherwise say:

“Okay, so what are you going to do about it?”

The Terrifying Freedom of Choice

Here’s the real reason people resist the change-it-or-choose-it idea.

It’s terrifying.

Because once you accept it, life becomes a tennis match where you’re holding the racket whether you like it or not.

Every decision becomes yours.

Stay in the job?
You chose it.

Stay in the relationship?
You chose it.

Stay in the city?
You chose it.

Stay in the same habits, routines, frustrations, and quiet little daily irritations?
You chose them.

And suddenly the comforting fog of helplessness disappears.

Which means you can’t hide inside it anymore.

The Footnotes of Your Life

David Foster Wallace loved footnotes.

Hundreds of them.

Sometimes they were longer than the actual text.

And if you’ve ever read Infinite Jest, you know those footnotes feel like wandering through a labyrinth of context, explanation, and digression.

Life is full of these footnotes.

The reasons we stay.
The explanations we tell ourselves.
The historical justifications for why things are the way they are.

“I can’t leave because…”
“I should stay because…”
“It’s complicated because…”

These are the footnotes of your life.

Some of them matter.

But at the end of the day, the main text still reads the same.

You stayed.

You didn’t change it.

Which means you chose it.

Radical Ownership

There’s a strange kind of liberation hiding inside this brutal philosophy.

When you admit that your life is the result of choices, something powerful happens.

You realize you can make different ones.

Not instantly.
Not magically.
But gradually.
Incrementally.

The way a tennis player improves: one swing at a time.
The way you eat a 72 ounce steak: one bite a time.

Maybe you can’t quit your job tomorrow.

But you can start looking.

You can learn a skill.
You can move sideways instead of forward.

Maybe you can’t overhaul your entire life.
But you can change your morning.

Your habits.
Your reactions.
The way you spend your attention.

Which, in the attention economy of the modern world, is basically the same thing as spending your life.

The Infinite Joke

Here’s the dark punchline.

The infinite joke of human existence is that most people spend their entire lives waiting for someone else to change the script.

The boss.
The partner.
The government.
The economy.
The culture.

Meanwhile their own agency sits there unused like a tennis racket gathering dust in the corner of the court.

They keep waiting.
And waiting.
And waiting.

For permission.
For rescue.
For circumstances to rearrange themselves like a cosmic furniture mover.

But the universe does not work that way.

The universe says:

Here is the ball.

Hit it or don’t.

Either way, the rally continues.

The Two Options

So we come back to the brutal simplicity of the rule.

Change it.
Or choose it.

If your commute drives you insane and you stay in the job, you chose the commute.
If your schedule exhausts you and you keep it, you chose the schedule.
If your habits make you unhappy and you repeat them, you chose the habits.

None of this means you’re stupid.
Or weak.
Or morally defective.

It just means you’re human.

Humans choose comfort over change all the time.

But the moment you recognize the choice, you gain something rare.

Clarity.

And clarity is dangerous.

Because once you see the choice, pretending you’re trapped starts to feel ridiculous.

Like complaining about the rules of tennis while holding the racket.

The Final Serve

Life is not a mystery novel.

It’s a rally.

A series of choices bouncing back and forth across the net of circumstance.

Sometimes the ball comes fast.
Sometimes it spins in weird directions.
Sometimes you whiff completely and fall on your face.

But the ball keeps coming.

And every swing you take shapes the next one.

So the next time you catch yourself complaining about some permanent fixture of your life, pause for a moment.

Ask the most annoying question possible.

“Why am I still choosing this?”

If the answer is rational—security, stability, responsibility—then fine.

Own the choice.

But if the answer is inertia, fear, or habit, then maybe it’s time to do the other thing.

The harder thing.

The thing that terrifies most people.

Change it.

Because if you don’t—you already know the punchline.

You chose it.