Useful Is Easy, Significant Is Hard
Every tradition has some version of the same moral instruction: the most valuable person is the one who benefits others. It is repeated so often that nobody tests it. But it doesn’t survive contact with reality. Being useful is easy — trivially, disturbingly easy. Give away everything you have and someone, somewhere, benefits. A body feeding scavengers is useful. Usefulness is a floor, not a summit. The hard thing — the thing no one has a method for — is being significant.
The confusion matters because so much identity gets mortgaged to usefulness. Most people, I suspect, do not have a purpose in life; they have a routine. Work, socializing, relationships, following the rules — these fill the space where a purpose would go, and running from the question of meaning is easier than answering it. That is why layoffs and bench periods hurt so disproportionately: when your job is your proxy for purpose, losing the job feels like losing the reason. Some people tie identity to their employer. Some tie it to the idea of being useful. Both are hostages.
Underneath all of this runs a quieter problem, one that took me years to name: performativeness. The habit of experiencing your own life as an audience would. Every interaction becomes a subtle status negotiation; every action is partly staged for an internal observer. It is exhausting, and it poisons even the things done “for yourself,” because you can never quite do anything without checking how it looks.
The honest questions that follow: is it possible to act without performing at all? To speak exactly what you think, unfiltered? Or is the filter — ego, superego, whatever you call it — precisely what makes us social creatures rather than feral ones? I don’t have the answer. What I’ve found is that certain spaces make the question sharper. In digital life, you don’t need the slow trust-building rituals of the physical world — the small talk, the initiation, the years of chipping away at strangers’ guardedness. Online you go straight to the thing: search, find, serendipity. Almost everything that has genuinely improved my life arrived that way — not designed, not planned, just stumbled into while wandering. And yet even there, the power games exist. Status-seeking was supposed to be a physical-world disease; it turned out the digital world just has its own arenas.
Which raises a strange inversion: why does authenticity feel less risky online than face-to-face? Why can a mask — an avatar, a username, a distance — be the condition for saying what you actually think? The self is a trickier object than we pretend. Every part of it seems to want to manage its own image.
The conclusion I’ve reached, provisionally, is this: stop optimizing for usefulness, and stop mistaking visibility for significance. What is actually worth the struggle is strength — the kind that lets you filter noise without fear, show yourself without flinching, and stand alone when the honest position is an unpopular one. Not strength as domination; strength as the precondition for an unperformed life. Everything else — the usefulness, the approval, the careful staging — is negotiable.
Drafted with AI assistance from my personal journal (2025-08-05), then edited by me. See On AI Assistance.