Life & Wisdom Quote by David Foster Wallace

Wallace pins a whole civic neurosis to a single, queasy confession: the desire for authority, followed immediately by shame at wanting it. The line is funny in that bleak Wallace way, because it treats a political impulse like an intrusive thought. "Some parents" is the perfect infantilizing euphemism - it makes the longing sound small and domestic, not ideological, even as it smuggles in the big ask: please, someone competent, someone sober, someone willing to say no.

The subtext is less about actual moms and dads than about a culture trained to resent limits while quietly collapsing without them. Wallace is writing from inside late-20th-century American consumer life, where adulthood gets reframed as choice-maximization and discomfort gets treated like a design flaw. In that environment, the "parent" isn't a tyrant; they're a relief. Someone to end the exhausting performance of being self-made, self-governing, endlessly optimizing. It's the same itch that makes paternal politicians, self-help gurus, and corporate "mission statements" feel comforting even when they should set off alarms.

The second sentence is the dagger: "we're uneasy" doesn't just acknowledge hypocrisy; it describes a moral hangover. Wanting parents back implies we've been living like orphans on purpose, mistaking freedom for the absence of obligation. Wallace's real target is the sophisticated adult who can deconstruct every system but can't admit they're tired. The question - "what's wrong with us?" - lands as both self-mockery and diagnosis: a society so allergic to being governed that it can only articulate its craving for guidance as pathology.