We no longer have to go down to the river to get water. We don’t have to farm our own crops or raise our own livestock. We have plenty. We are bored.

Even if you work two jobs, you still probably spend a good amount of time watching T.V. each day.

There are days that I spend longer staring at a screen than not. Is that wrong? In a society where our lives are largely divorced from material hardship, we demand entertainment.

Writer David Foster Wallace said television was his main addiction. In “Infinite Jest,” one of his characters watches TV, reclined back with a tray positioned at chin level so he could eat without taking his eyes off the television.

I’m in touch with this sometimes, especially after ordering wings. Reading is considered good for you. Parents sometimes restrict how much T.V. a child can watch, but no parent tells their kid, “you’ve been reading too much.”

However, in the 19th century, the novel, which was just coming into its own, was considered racy, vulgar, and low-brow. Well-to-do parents did indeed restrict what their kids read.

“Infinite Jest,” much like “Ulysses” by James Joyce, is pretty unreadable. Wallace said he wanted the reader to have to work. He didn’t want to make his book easy to read. I’d say, if you have a message or a story to tell, you should make it as accessible to as many people as possible.

On the other hand, as one of my editors pointed out, literature might lose its value if writers made their stories too easy to understand.