Currently I am occupied.
When we describe our work as our occupation, we envision ourselves as actors and agents. Yet it is we who are possessed, our time and mental faculties engaged—occupied like a toilet on a plane, or a house. We are in use. Useful. Used, perhaps exploited.
I met a man the other day who told me he was of no use to anyone. Must everything and everyone have a use, have a purpose and a point? Utility or futility…are those the only choices? I can’t deny that I’d rather be as one possessed, to be occupied, than to be vacant.
May 20, 2014
M Sinclair Stevens
+Francois Demers, I think when we are younger, service to others feels like duty or obligation, a servitude. To be occupied with the needs others impinges upon the territory of the self and we long to assert our independence, to stake our claim to ourselves. Yet as we age, we realize that it is our usefulness that is fulfilling, the showcase of our abilities. Where is our sense of self in the end when we are of no use, abandoned, vacant, and alone.
May 20, 2014
Denis Wallez
+2
Uselessness is good, if it is understood.
It means you dropped the illusion that you can control the world, that the world will conform to your desires “if only you can just finish this, or do that, or acquire this…”
Uselessness allows for an unbiased response to whatever arises, without the biases introduced by a pre-conceived agenda (‘use’).
Uselessness allows freedom, which is the opposite of inaction and the opposite of disengagement: don’t equate uselessness with inactivity.
Art is “useless”. Freedom is “useless”, it is profoundly different from everything else we do in our lives, scheming, rushing, reaching out, avoiding… basically being controlled by our goals (often given to us by peer pressure rather than freely chosen… and sometimes freely chosen but outdated anyway, and we wouldn’t repeat the choice if it was not for the bias of the “sunk cost”, so this is no longer a free choice, it is just habit)!
Our whole lives are ordinarily organised around one purpose or another, at each moment. Everything we do has a purpose, whether it’s to earn money, have a good time, or avoid pain. Everything we do can thus be judged on some scale of accomplishment… all nice and good but forgetting that the creative journey, the constructive engagement with world, cannot be so easily measured with pre-defined scales, that new trails require new scales, that referencing to pre-existing scales only will lock you down and make you go round in circles of the already-known!
Everything you do while being fully ‘present’ to it is ‘useless’; it has no point outside of itself, outside of this moment itself, outside of here&now. Which doesn’t mean you’re doing nothing or having no impact…