compare and contrast: jesus and spiderman

The following is an excerpt from a paper he wrote once about Hal Incandenza, the protagonist of David Foster Wallace's epic Infinite Jest:

The internet age is a new frontier of dehumanization and fracturing. Social networking creates the illusion of collecting people, collecting friends and subsequently observing their life with relative anonymity. The oddity is that many of these people you have collected are, for most intents and purposes, strangers to you. If you observe the daily minutiae of a person’s life, make judgments (impossible to avoid) and then never truly interact with them are they even real people? Does it make a difference? The only evidence of their existence you have is a virtual page floating in the techno-ether. The result is a sort of generational solipsism, everyone inside themselves, unable to speak to the frustration and lack of purpose that I find evident in many people my age. Hal is, in a sense, an everyman; a portrait of angst growing more complex and desperate as the world rushes by.

You'll worry less what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.

if he had had to create a bumper sticker to model his philosophy of life after, it may have been something to this effect:

There is an "aha!" moment he remembers here. As much as he liked to pretend he did not worry about what people thought, he certainly did, in fact, worry. All of this worrying was very introspective, very unproductive and very tiring. He slowly came to realize that the majority of people shared this self concern as well as varying degrees of anxiety surrounding it.

This anxiety, he found, came from a sort of meta-misconception. People mostly fail to realize that most people are too busy thinking about themselves to actively judge other people. Most people fail to realize that their blemishes are invisible on a cursory glance (which is all most people will give them).

Of course, he never much cared for bumper stickers and was not particularly concerned with what people thought about his philosophy-- they had their own bumper stickers to worry about.