Life & Wisdom Quote by David Foster Wallace

Wallace is poking a thumb in the eye of the cozy story we tell ourselves about our own lives: that what feels familiar is therefore known, earned, and true. He puts "familiarity" in scare quotes to treat it like a suspect concept, not a comforting one. Then he twists the knife with "meditated and delusive" - a pairing that suggests familiarity is both deliberate and false. Not an accident of routine, but a kind of self-authored hallucination.

The intent is less self-help than self-defense. In Wallace's work, the real danger isn't ignorance; it's autopilot. Familiarity is what lets you stop looking closely at other people, at systems, at your own motives. It's the brain's labor-saving device that quietly becomes a moral liability. By calling it "important" to build reminders, he implies the default setting is relentless drift: the mind will keep manufacturing the illusion of understanding unless you actively interrupt it.

Subtextually, he's describing a modern condition: mediated experience. Our sense of what is normal is filtered through habits, entertainment, consumer routines, and social scripts that feel natural precisely because they're repeated. "Meditated" also hints at reflection as performance - the stories we rehearse about ourselves until they harden into reality.

Contextually, this sits squarely in Wallace's larger project: yanking the reader out of passive consumption and back into alertness. The line doesn't ask you to distrust the world; it asks you to distrust the ease with which the world becomes legible.