Embracing Being Useless

The dog is showing me the way.

“What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.” Sylvia Plath

At first this quote lodged deep in my soul like a pesky splinter, painful and annoying and impossible to dislodge. I felt very seen by a dead poet with questionable taste in men and a talent for turning mental anguish and despair into verse.

Then I started to think about it more. How are we defining useful? And useful to whom? As a millennial woman, I was raised with the expectation that well-educated, useful women held down high powered, six-figured jobs while selflessly raising high-achieving children, doing 90% of the emotional and domestic labor at home and giving back to their communities, ideally by chaperoning the first grade field trip to the zoo and volunteering to sit next to the kid who throws up on the bus because no one else wants to.

I never found this useful for my own mental health, although I’m sure someone benefited from my frantic drive to prove that I could do more and more, better and faster.

I’ve decided to claim useless as my own. Useless walks that meander without purpose. Useless learning that won’t further my career. Useless networking with random, interesting people that I meet on the street in my funky little surf town. Useless writing that doesn’t further the scientific field. Useless labor to perfect my banana bread recipe, eaten only by me, during afternoon snack with tea.

When I feel uneasy with all this uselessness, all I have to do is look at the dog. She is very, very good at being useless. She gravitates towards it. When we aren’t putting her in costumes for our own amusement or making her do rudimentary training, she runs off to be completely and thoroughly useless. She naps in the sun on the big comfy chair, wanders through the meadow without concern for destination or time, and can stare out the window for an entire afternoon and consider it a day well spent.

I have a long way to go until I reach her level of indifference, but so far it is not at all horrifying. In fact, it feels pretty good.