Uselessness

In a social context, to call a person 'useless' is one of the gravest insults, because usefulness is a fundamental requirement of a social collective. Why must we be useful? One of the most destructive concepts that we grow up to believe is:

'it's more important to be useful than it is to be yourself'.

For a child growing up, it's incredibly confusing and often deeply disappointing when on the one hand, they are told to be themselves, but on the other hand, they are told that they must be what society wants them to be; that society has a menu - a set range of options - from which they must choose a paint-by-numbers persona; that they must craft themselves into a useful cog in the social wheel in order to belong, to contribute, to survive. Their natural drive to be themselves is stopped in its tracks. Up until this point, the child, who has appeared to be the naive innocent, has in fact had a far greater grasp of what it is to express self than their adult compatriots, but now society tells them they must drop this in order to 'grow up'.

The social menu contains choices that reflect only an extremely narrow idea of what it means to express self. The child is coaxed into squeezing their own expanding idea of self into one or other of the choices provided, and then begins to forget; to dismiss the joyful potential of genuine self expression as the foolish dream of a naive child.

And so in the social context we've cast in stone our idea of exactly how each individual must contribute in order to be a person of 'worth'; in order to be useful. This is how the definition of usefulness has become a yoke around the neck of each person.

If we are to think for ourselves, we must first become 'useless' in the social sense. We must drop the need to live through somebody else's values, and find our own. The book 'The Willing Misfit' examines in depth how we might achieve this. Download the free ebook 'The Willing Misfit' at:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/137307