Tip-Off #121 - Truly Useless
"I learn by digesting my own delusions." ― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation: A Novel.
What have I accomplished today? Why do I waste so much time?
The famous Nike slogan says, "Just Do It." The fridge magnet is a good reminder: "Success is 90% perspiration, 10% inspiration." Stop turning life into a yawn.
Practically, worthiness requires activity and expression. I can't even be useless without writing about it. Silence isn't part of listening but figuring out what to say. And when you say it, "Don't beat around the bush!" Emily Dickinson's line belongs at afternoon tea: "Tell the truth, but tell it slant." Immediacy, transparency, and clarity trump subtlety and nuance.
Big Tech's concept of creative value is based on vanity metrics such as likes, views, shares, and reactions. The New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka coined the term "Filterworld": "go viral or perish." The success of the algorithm reduces cultural quality to current trends.
In a darkly comic and disturbing story of defiance, one of today's acclaimed novelists, Ottessa Moshfegh, portrays rebellion as passivity and uselessness as a survival tactic. Her novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, makes the reader wince, laugh, and think twice about someone tired of being attractive and lost in their shallowness. Moshfegh is known for her piercing wit — and unflinching honesty, which sometimes includes scatological humor or otherwise caustic remarks.
The central character, a young woman and the narrator tries to rise above her "reality" by sleeping for a year. She dreams of a better life in isolation from the world and despairs still more. "It was lunacy, this idea, that I could sleep myself into a new life. Preposterous. But there I was, approaching the depths of my journey. The world was out there still, but it seemed implausible." She seems to find her humanity through growing awareness of her complicity in what she deplores. With this author, self-awareness isn't the tired trope of another memoir.
Moshfegh said about herself, "I learn by digesting my own delusions." Her protagonist would half agree: we're left with the unsettling possibility that she has never honestly woken up. The beauty lies in this ambiguity. Readers are left wondering how wide awake we are -- urged to second-guess the nature of our own attachments and realize how contradictory they are. In an interview, Moshfegh said of herself, "It requires courage to be hostile and contradictory. My creativity seems to gain traction out of this relationship with reality: I hate you, I hate myself, I love myself, you love me, I love you, I hate you, ad infinitum. I am interested in my own hypocrisy. It provides the turbulence for me to change." With most writers, this mindset would be as tedious as my writing about it may make it sound.
But reading the shallows so incisively, Moshfegh brings to mind a master of the depths, the renowned philosopher Martin Heidegger. His exploration of authentic existence in the face of absurdity resonates with the alienation and "uselessness" Ottessa Moshfegh addresses. A leading thinker today provides an excellent analysis of Heidegger's later ideas, emphasizing a central point:
"The world is now meaningful according to the degree of usefulness we find in it. The regime of subjectivity has confined all reality within the limits of our power to propose and dispose. More and more, our culture has become incapable of reverence before the mystery of being, and therefore incapable of reverent hesitation. And this pervasive, largely unthinking impiety underlies most of our time's special barbarisms."
Contradictions abound. Complaints about the shallowness of culture reach their natural conclusion with the purchase of a pair of perfectly cut black trousers. The algorithm's success reduces cultural quality to current trends and a curated post on LinkedIn.
We are all, at some level, hypocrites, driven by what we deride. But the real “turbulence for me to change” comes not from another lecture but from poking fun at my own pretensions. The novelist's wit is wisdom. Contradiction becomes a rigorous testing ground, not a measure of defeat. Creativity wakes up in this dynamic relationship with reality. Self-awareness does not matter because it is useful but because it's true.
Notes and reading
"I learn by digesting my own delusions." - Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), chapter four.
“It requires courage to be hostile and contradictory…” - Moshfegh, in The Master's Review: A Platform for Emerging Writers (October 19, 2015).
Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture - Kyle Chayka (2024). "To escape Filterworld and even transcend it, we must first understand it."
“The world is now meaningful..." - Martin Heidegger, from an essay by David Bentley Hart, “A Figure in the Twilight," Leaves in the Wind — Substack (October 27, 2023). The quote is slightly altered here. Originally, it reads, "The world is now what we can 'enframe,' whose meaning we alone establish . . .”
For further thought
A stunning reinvention of the myth of Narcissus - A. Natasha Joukovsky, The Portrait of a Mirror: A Novel (2021) – See Joukovsky's comments about Moshfegh in "7 Novels that Subvert Social Norms," in Electric Literature (May 31, 2021), as well as her Quite Useless Substack: "deep thoughts on art, desire, and superficiality."
"What prepares [us] for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century." Loneliness is a uniquely corrosive condition. - The Origins of Totalitarianism - Hannah Arendt (2nd edition, 1958), III - 478. (Cf. Simone Weil, The Need for Roots - 1943)
Note: The U.S. Surgeon General released a “General Advisory,” raising alarm about the devastating impact of the epidemic of loneliness and isolation affecting half of U.S. adults and a growing number of teenagers. (The entire Advisory is available online through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.)
The “death of irony” and its many reincarnations - An investigation into just who declared irony dead in the wake of 9/11. Eric Randall, The Atlantic (September 9, 2011).
"The Empire of Irony” in The Essential Wayne Booth (2006), 100-119. Booth's work on irony remains a cornerstone of literary criticism and rhetorical studies decades after its publication.