Exercising in Futility

As I hinted towards in my last post, too often we judge certain aspects of our life by how "useful" or how "beneficial" they are. As I said, just because something isn't useful, doesn't mean it's not worth doing. I guess this sort of builds on what I said earlier: That all humans are simply born, live, and then die. In the end, isn't everything useless? All the wealth we can accumulate and the accolades we can achieve, do they really mean anything in the grand scheme of this universe? Whatever our goal, be it success, wealth, happiness, knowledge, or truth, the finite limit set on our lives makes every action we take pointless. We're all going to die someday, humanity is going to die someday, the universe will end someday. So why should we gauge our actions based upon how useful or beneficial they can be?

Now I can hear many of you saying, "well wait, wouldn't we all be hippies then? Burnt-out 'I don't give a crap about the world' hippies. I mean, hippies stink. They really smell. I don't want to smell. I don't want to be a hippy and smell!" (At least that's my train of thought) No, because there are certain things that are worth doing, certain things that are not. It's not necessarily how useful something is, but more so whether it satisfies a certain desire specific to your own self. It's completely useless to draw a picture. Completely useless. A picture has absolutely no intrinsic value and is only given meaning by those who view it. However, if drawing that picture manages to satisfy the part of you that desires to draw a picture, then it's worth doing. This blog is completely useless (I mean completely). I have no idea if anyone reads it, I don't really put too much thought or research into each post (maybe 30 minutes of youtube searching for some cool clips and wikipedia'ing for pictures and random info), and I doubt that anyone gets any truly amazing revelations about their own lives by reading my ramblings. But simply having my thoughts written down satisfies a certain part of me that desires such.

A lot of people say that about my taking Japanese as well. "Why would you take Japanese, such a waste of time." (It's mostly my Chinese relatives that say this...) (Yea they're really racist...) And they're right. Japanese is about as useless as it gets, language-wise (probably the only more useless language would be Latin, because ALL the people who speak it in everyday conversation are DEAD). Japanese is spoken by the people of one tiny little island country, with a population just under 130 million (To put that in perspective, that's 1/10th the population of China). But to me, Japanese is fun. I enjoy taking it. Doesn't that make it far more worthwhile than taking some language that is useful but that I dislike/suck at/have extreme difficulty learning (ie Spanish/German/Chinese). Not to say those languages aren't worthwhile to other people, just that they're not worthwhile to me.

In the end, I guess all boils down to this: Don't do what other people tell you to do. Make up your own mind as to what is important, what is useful. Then do those things, and don't give a shit as to what other people think. Be true to yourself, no one else. And that makes a great segway into this video. Presenting "Be Good To Yourself," performed by Journey, with the immortal Steve Perry on vocals.