[Seth Says] The Benefit Of Being Useless

I know it seems like a super-weird thing to say, right? Like, isn't being useful sort of a goal? And no, this isn't just due to some semantic misunderstanding where I'm new to English and/or colloquialisms and construct a flawed syllogism of "Being a Tool is bad, Tools are useful, therefore being useful is bad." (And all men are Socrates.)

No, this is a thought I had after seeing
 

A thing? In this economy? Well, yes. Specifically, I was seeing a tweet from a journalist who recently lost her job (because between AI and corporate consolidation, it's a bad time to be a writer)(although it's a good time to be a wealthy corporation owner)(then again, when isn't it?)(maybe when the revolution comes)(there are never any revolutions in parentheses)[but there are in lower income brackets](that's my favorite punctuation joke since the interrobang joke)(period)(oh damn, I forgot the sentence we were amidst. okay, there was a journalist...), who was complaining about the fact that soon after she lost her job -- and thus her ability to propel other people into the spotlight and offer them publicity -- she found that a lot of her erstwhile friends disappeared.

Which, y'know, huge disappointment, right? You think you have a lot of friends who appreciate you for your personality or whatnot, and it turns out, their friendship was entirely predicated on your ability to boost their fame and income. And this is not restricted to journalists. While I probably know more fabulous journalists than I do fabulously wealthy people, I've oft heard that one of the perils of success is that opportunistic friends suddenly appear when you are rich and famous, and then disappear just as fast when you can't do anything for them any more. And indeed, I saw another thing on Twitter this evening from a content creator lamenting that some former friends turned on him as soon as he stopped boosting/promoting their content.

All of which is by way of saying, the silver lining of not being a wealthy, famous, or influential individual is that it's much more likely that the friends you have actually like you for you, rather than for what you can do for them. Celebrities always have to wonder if anyone who talks to them only cares about profit. Whereas I know that both of the people who talk to me have nothing to gain except my nonsense ramblings.

In fact, even my nonsense ramblings are available to the public in newspapers and so forth. But you're in a more elite group than the public, so they're available to you right here.

 

So, I'll preface this column by saying that I really had a lot of fun writing it (as mentioned last issue) and think it is either one of the best or worst jokes I've written in some time... but it does hinge on a reference that some people who do not live on the Internet may not get. So if you are, for example, my parents, you can look forward to enjoying most of the column and then dissecting a dead frog at the end.

But if you spend a lot of time on the Internet and/or like cats, I feel like this is one of those things on the Internet that people laugh at and share with other people who like that sort of thing because it's a thing:
 

It turns out, it's hard to avoid spoilers while not sounding dumb. (although it's easy to do one or the other: "the cinematic masterpiece Citizen Kane culminates in his deathbed declaration of 'Rosebud', recalling his childhood sled."  "Meep moop meep moop me like movies.")  But hopefully you read the story, because I think some of you will really enjoy it, even if some of you will receive instead a dead frog. (real, unboned, crunchy). 

 

Hi there! I forgot to put any sort of introduction at the beginning of this newsletter, so this seems as good a place as any to offer greetings and hope for your continued lack of demise and so forth. Many cultures and languages use the same thing for greetings and goodbyes, from "Aloha" (Hawaii) to "Shalom" (Israel) to a friendly hand wave (the midwest) to a middle finger (New York).

The middle finger, incidentally, is the perfect greeting for those of us who specialize in uselessness. It's a bit of F.U.tility.

Thanks for reading, and back in two weeks with another column.



Just Tooling Around,
Seth