In 1996 Harper’s sent David Foster Wallace on a seven-night luxury cruise around the Caribbean, and he came back with the most famous essay ever written about not having fun on purpose.
The ship was Celebrity Cruises’ m.v. Zenith. Within pages he had renamed it the Nadir.
His thesis: the mass-market luxury cruise is unbearably sad. It promises to pamper you (the brochure’s favourite word, which is also the diaper word) and to manage every ounce of your pleasure so you never have to decide anything. When the organised fun stops at night, despair comes in through the porthole.
It came out a month before Infinite Jest and, expanded, became the title essay of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997). Twenty-seven years later Lauren Oyler boarded a ship of the same line and wrote back: I Really Didn’t Want to Go.