Daring to Be Completely Useless

I feel compelled to keep up with the discourse, which fuels my Twitter/X addiction. I want to be on top of current trends, to contribute something noteworthy, to participate, however shamefacedly, in that vast economy of “likes,” that ever fluctuating stock market of vague approval. I scroll searching for some ember of deranged thought, sufficient to spark the conflagration of an 800 word think piece on the way we live now, questing for whatever severe light Elon Musk’s latest baby mama crisis or Russell Brand interrogating a porn star can shed on the mystery of existence.

But, shockingly enough, it seems to have the opposite effect. It’s completely enervating. I actually have less to say and start to feel like communication itself is fairly pointless. (Unwillingly, the fatalistic drumbeat of a single name starts to pulse inside my consciousness, echoing and re-echoing: Elon Elon Elon Elon Elon Elon Elon Elon…). It seems like there’s nothing left to do but to retreat into the innermost cell of sacred silence. Language starts to seem, as some have theorized, like a virus. Words exist merely to propagate other words. The Desert Fathers had the right idea.

But, curiously enough, when I disavow the discourse, when I return to my personal library or just go for a walk, I suddenly have something to say. Witnessing the endless sewer steam of verbiage does nothing for me. But silence refreshes thought, puts a potency behind words. Communion with the dead, reading an old book, is just as helpful.

Part of the problem is that needing to say something relevant misdirects the current of attention, placing it under the sway of obscure and malevolent forces. You become enslaved to the terms of a conversation that you never would have started in the first place, if you could have helped it. Pulling away from it lets you orient yourself to the planets properly, lets you put yourself in the field of cosmic influences.

Someone asked Honore de Balzac why he never went out in society, even though he wrote about it constantly. (He spent most of his time indoors hiding from his creditors). Balzac responded, “I create society!”

I think this is the right attitude to have for a writer. You need a certain supreme arrogance, believing against all evidence that you can legislate reality, despite the fact that you’re working in obscurity and in a metier that is now about as culturally central as the art of the mime. This species of derangement is maybe the only thing currently holding civilization up.

Yet at the same time, if you consciously set out to legislate and control, to be relevant and savvy, it’s probably all going to end up sucking fairly hard. All of my best ideas (or what I imagine are my best ideas) come from tuning out my own ambitions. They come from a state of play, essentially.

I think the freedom to play is the hardest thing to recover right now - for everyone, but particularly for me as I get into my mid-late thirties. I start to feel the pressure to achieve something with my writing, which is the very opposite of what I find most liberating and fruitful: to dare to be completely useless.

Nietzsche said that “man’s maturity” consists in this: “to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.” The effort to regain this is something that the powers that be actively work to retard. But it’s still a vital and accessible possibility. You just have to get the censor out of your head, that dread social voice that wants you to keep marketing your image to the crowd, to keep deforming your face in a million distorting mirrors. You have to dare, at least for awhile, to be completely invisible.