Consider the Cockroaches of the Sea

How a well-timed essay can change the way you see everything

One of the most critical moments of my graduate school experience at CU Boulder was when one of my favorite (badass female) professors introduced me to Consider the Lobster. I remember reading it in a daze, realizing that the way I thought about art, interrogating work, and following trains of thought had fundamentally shifted. She pointed me there and I dove in. The way (admittedly problematic) DFW* built an argument felt like the moment I learned that wolves reintroduced into Yellowstone changed the shape of the rivers. On its face, the connection doesn’t seem obvious. But it makes perfect sense once you step back and take in the entire ecosystem. Predators reshape prey behavior, which reshapes the landscape and everything else. Consider the Lobster isn’t about a lobster festival; it isn’t even about pain; it’s about how one small, unexpected question can change how you see everything around it.

Consider the Lobster starts in one place and ends up somewhere entirely different, a magic trick masquerading as a food essay. You think you’re reading about Maine’s annual lobster festival, a folksy, butter-drenched Americana spectacle. Before you know it, you’re hip-deep in an ethical quagmire about class, sentience, and the queasy moral calculus of culinary pleasure. But I don’t want to linger on the morality of pain (unironically). Instead, I’m obsessed with how Wallace gets us there, how he pivots, makes the unexpected seem inevitable, and sidesteps the obvious in favor of something thornier, more interesting. Oh how I want to embody this in the entirety of my existence!

If you strip away the ethical dilemmas and the meticulous footnotes, you’re left with a masterclass in approach. This is an essay about how to write an essay and how to dismantle a topic while pretending to assemble it. Wallace doesn’t kick down the door and announce, “This is about suffering!” Instead, he starts with the charm, New England kitsch, the pageantry of melted butter, the tourists in their L.L. Bean best. He gives you the kind of travelogue you expect, the light observational wit, the anthropology of the summer fair. And then, when you’re comfortable, when you think you know where this is going, he shifts. He asks a small, almost invisible question, “Do lobsters feel pain?” And suddenly, the entire framework buckles. You realize this was never about a festival at all.

New England has always been a place of layered histories, Puritan discipline hiding behind clapboard charm, and rocky coastlines both picturesque and punishing. Wallace, ever attuned to contradiction, uses this setting as a backdrop and thematic partner. With its quaint excess, the lobster festival embodies a particular American mythology, the promise of plenty, the romance of tradition, and the erasure of the painful and “unpleasant” parts. He leans into that, lulls you with the comforting cadence of food writing, and then methodically undoes it. By the time you reach the end, you’re not thinking about tourism or regional pride. You’re thinking about suffering, systems of convenience, and the hidden cost of pleasure.

The unbearable whiteness of my being occasionally yearns for this…

And isn’t that the kind of shift we’re constantly navigating today? We live in an era where cultural reckonings arrive at a breakneck pace, where what seemed unquestionable last year is under scrutiny today, where the conversation is constantly evolving. It’s happening in how we think about work and burnout, in the way people are reassessing tech, AI, and the ethics of automation. It’s there in how we talk about media, how old sitcoms get re-evaluated under new lenses, and how we consume true crime differently now that we’ve recognized our complicity in treating tragedy as entertainment. What Wallace does in Consider the Lobster, leading you gently into one conversation before flipping the table and making you question the very nature of the discussion, is precisely how modern cultural discourse functions. Hell, as I mention below, this exact thing has happened with Wallace as a public figure.

Bo Burnham’s Inside is another work that accomplishes this kind of sleight of hand. What starts as a quarantine comedy special, a meditation on internet culture, loneliness, and performativity, slowly unravels into something heavier, stranger, more disorienting. Burnham lures you in with humor, catchy melodies, and perfectly timed self-deprecation, and then, suddenly, you’re staring directly into an existential abyss. The laughter turns uneasy. The observations hit too close to home. It’s a comedy special that isn’t really about comedy, in the same way that Consider the Lobster isn’t really about lobsters. Both works operate by subverting expectations, giving you one thing and then forcing you to acknowledge something more profound that you weren’t entirely prepared to confront.

And the comparison between the two men is ironic in its contrasts and similarities. Wallace was a maximalist, verbose, dense, intellectual to the point of exhaustion, while Burnham is a modern minimalist, using tight lyrics, stark lighting, and silence as much as words. Wallace wrote about the contemporary world’s overstimulation; Burnham embodies it, performing his disintegration in real-time, singing through the claustrophobia of internet culture and the paralysis of self-awareness. Yet at their cores, both artists are obsessed with the same thing: what it means to examine something deeply, to peel away the layers of performance and self-delusion and find whatever strange, uncomfortable truth lies beneath. Wallace did it with footnotes and recursive arguments; Burnham does it with auto-tuned existential crises.

This is why nuance is so crucial. The best art doesn’t just hand you an idea, it tricks you into thinking you arrived at it yourself. It leads you somewhere unexpected, forcing you to sit with the discomfort of your shifting perspective. And in a world that increasingly demands everything to be either wholly good or wholly bad, complexity is more important than ever. Not everything can, or should, be reduced to a take, a soundbite, a stance. Some things are meant to make you wrestle, reconsider, and make you uncomfortable in ways that linger long after you’ve closed the book or shut off the screen.

And if that all feels a little too heavy, consider this: somewhere out there, a person is eating a lobster roll, blissfully unaware of the existential spiral it could send them into if they read the wrong essay at the wrong time. Ignorance, as they say, is butter-soaked bliss.

xo, Sofia

*Of course, talking about Wallace now also means acknowledging the parts of his legacy that are dark. His writing is brilliant, but he was also deeply flawed, a man whose personal life was marked by troubling behavior, particularly toward women. The Me Too movement brought a reckoning to literary circles, forcing readers to reconsider the ways we separate art from the artist and the ways we excuse genius at the expense of accountability. Wallace’s essays may be masterclasses in critical thinking, but his life didn’t always reflect that same level of introspection. It adds an important asterisk to every discussion of his work.