Not getting the story is a wonderful journalistic tradition. The writer is sent to write about a baton-twirling school or a car show or a motorcycle race, but he doesn’t have a story, not the one he’s supposed to have, not the one for which he’s getting paid. What does he do?

Well, he begins by making his failure very clear. Then he sets up a childlike antagonism with The Man, using his draconian editor as a foil. He describes things at a remove. He relies on his belletristic talents to get through, and then he unveils, with a flourish either self-deprecating or explosive, that what he did find was the very pulse of our nation. His not finding has been much more profound than any old finding. In Terry Southern’s “Twirling at Ole Miss,” for example, the whole South seems to simmer just off stage, ready to boil over into a race riot while the author rides around town ogling the cutie pies and trying to score drugs.

This kind of journalism can be a blast – though it is hard to believe we need a constitutional amendment to protect the freedoms of such jaded individuals. David Rakoff makes the anti-scoop his shtick. He proudly calls himself “the world’s worst reporter.” He does something or goes somewhere and doesn’t report on it, but rather muses on his own condition while experiencing it.

In “Don’t Get Too Comfortable” (Doubleday, 223 pages, $22.95), Mr. Rakoff’s beat is the pinnacle of decadence and excess. He flies on the Concorde, takes a job as a pool boy in South Beach, goes to the couture shows in Paris. Mostly, whatever the scene, Mr. Rakoff kvetches about it. “At 42,000 feet and Mach 1.71 (1,110 mph), we are given some small canapes. Triple rounds of edible money: filet mignon topped with caviar, smoked salmon, foie gras and a gooseberry; followed by a salad of duck confit with still more foie gras and greens; and a cheese course.”

It’s odd to have reached a point in your life where you can be snide about eating too much foie gras. When you can do it while flying on the Concorde, it’s particularly strange. When you can manage it in the pages of a book ostensibly written to skewer First World problems, it’s safe to say you need some kind of help.

“Don’t Get Too Comfortable” is subtitled “The Indignities of Coach Class, the Torments of Low Thread Count, the Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems.” That is a book I’d still very much like to read; I’d even like to read a book by Mr. Rakoff about that. He is uproariously funny.

While eating in a diaphanously disguised Chez Panisse and reflecting on a recent New York Times article about ice you could buy from a stream in Scotland, and about Amanda Hesser writing about salt, he writes:

Surely when we’ve reached the point where we’re fetishizing sodium chloride and water, and subjecting both to the kind of scrutiny we used to reserve for choosing an oncologist, it’s time to admit that the relentless questing for that next undetectable gradation of perfection has stopped being about the thing itself and crossed over into a realm of narcissism so overwhelming as to make the act of masturbation look selfless.

That’s the kind of writing that makes you pick up the telephone, the kind of thing you read aloud to the wife. If Mr. Rakoff had mined that lode, you’d applaud him for pulling off a hilarious inside job.

But his attentions wander, and with them, the book. Reflecting on the nature of fashion, our mandarin/hedonic tendencies, or the Log Cabin Republicans makes sense. Chapters on the “Puppetry of the Penis,” foraging in Prospect Park, or a downtown scavenger hunt called “Midnight Madness” don’t have enough weight to be written about outside of New York unless they are granted that weight by the author. And Mr. Rakoff doesn’t deliver weight.

When ensconced at a South Beach hotel up the street from the one at which he’s pretending to work, he writes: “As I wait for my breakfast in my white terrycloth robe I think, I hope room service arrives on time so I’m not late for my fake job.” When writing about Martha Stewart, he quickly turns it around to what Martha means to David Rakoff, which centers on having justified and made celebratory the term “art fag.” His own narcissism prevents him from ever getting to the heart of any matter.

Still, not getting the story must have led him somewhere; the light must have hit him. No such luck. The second-to-last chapter recounts his attempt to gain a cheap leg-up into some sort of revelation through fasting, and is written as a kind of diary. “Is this my shiny, rosy-hued epiphany?” he asks. It isn’t. And neither is it ours. By the end of “Don’t Get Too Comfortable, rather than gaining a sharp focus on the way we live, our focus is sharpest on Mr. Rakoff. I suppose kvetching, self-regarding journalists are a First World problem.

Mr. Watman is the author of “Race Day: A Spot on the Rail With Max Watman.” He can be reached atmwatman@nysun.com.