Embracing the Useless Life: How Postmodernism and Daoism Challenge Our Obsession with Usefulness

Embracing the Useless Life: How Postmodernism and Daoism Challenge Our Obsession with Usefulness

Modernism and postmodernism are two philosophical dispositions that have infiltrated our day-to-day lives. While modernists believe in evidence over feelings and see history as a series of struggles bringing humanity closer to truth, postmodernists believe that truth is subjective and that facts are socially constructed and arbitrary. Similarly, Daoism challenges the idea of usefulness as the bottom line for evaluating our life choices and argues that we can reclaim our lives by becoming more useless. These philosophies share a common thread of rejecting the idea that everything we do should be useful or have some benefit.

In a world full of uncertainty and doubt, postmodernism thrives. It generates a sense of loneliness by fostering distrust and distance rather than trust. It also radicalizes people by making knowledge appear to be arbitrary and political, leading to the trend of irony or snark, which serves an almost exclusively negative function. However, writer David Foster Wallace argues that it's only sincerity, actually stating what you mean and showing that you care, that can give our lives a sense of meaning and fulfillment. In rejecting the obsession with usefulness, Daoism proposes a life of wandering or "play" and suggests that we consider celebrating gnarly trees and disabled bodies.

Zhuangzi, the ancient Daoist philosopher, argues that usefulness itself should not be life's bottom line. The point is that a tree or a human being cannot be reduced to its usefulness. Disabled bodies challenge the utilitarian calculus that underlies much of our contemporary daily existence. Zhuangzi shows that this mindset traps us in a calculus where we end up seeing ourselves and people around us as a means to an end. He suggests a life of free and easy wandering, not caring about praise or condemnation, as true freedom.

Both postmodernism and Daoism reject the idea of usefulness as the sole purpose of life. They challenge us to celebrate diversity, difference, and wildly varied ways of living life well. Rather than fleeing the social world, as Zhuangzi suggests, we should be in but not of the world. We should reject casting ourselves and our doings in terms of how much we contribute and instead consider a life of simply being. In doing so, we can become a glorious part of the greater Universe, and when we become one with the Dao, we become our true selves.