Life & Wisdom Quote by David Foster Wallace

TV, in Wallace's hands, isn't a villain so much as a perfectly trained animal: it sniffs out mass desire and brings back the stick, every time. The dash-parenthetical - "and realize that this is 'all it does'" - is the knife. He's not arguing television sometimes panders; he's arguing that pandering is the medium's operating system. The scare quotes around "all it does" and "think they want" signal the real target: not viewers' wants, but the shallow self-knowledge that makes those wants legible to marketers.

The intent is diagnostic, almost procedural. TV "discerns" rather than creates, which sounds generous until you notice the implication: if a machine can reliably read your appetites, they're probably simplified into something measurable. What "large numbers of people" want must be what large numbers can want at once - comfort, familiarity, easy emotion, low-friction conflict. That isn't a moral failure so much as an economic one: in a ratings-driven environment, the safest content is the content that confirms the audience's existing picture of itself.

The subtext is Wallace's recurring suspicion that irony and entertainment are not neutral pleasures but habits that reshape attention. If television's job is to mirror desire back to the public, it will also train the public to desire what mirrors well: the kind of want that can be quickly recognized, packaged, and sold. Contextually, this lands in a late-20th-century media ecology where "choice" expands while imagination narrows - more channels, fewer surprises. Wallace is warning that the medium's brilliance is inseparable from its limitation: it can give us what we want, and in doing so, keep us from learning what else we might want instead.