The Purpose Of My System
It took five days and some change of not posting to Bluesky without anyone even noticing I was gone—despite the fact that the last thing I’d posted back on March 8 was, “My life is a waste and should have been given to somebody else.”—(the exception being my mother, because moms) before I had to relent in order to subject Chuck Schumer to some abuse.
It was not originally planned as some sort of experiment. It’s just where I was psychologically and existentially seven days ago and I didn’t much care to keep up with social media in the time since because, well, take your fucking pick. Once I realized that an entire day had passed with no one wondering where I’d gone (I’m not typically what could be described as an infrequent poster), I was curious to see how long my absence would remain unnoticed or at least unremarked.
I’ve been thinking a bit this week about something I wrote twenty years ago and noticed only now that my description of something said in the television show Angel differs from what actually is said in the television show Angel, in a way that I think bears some degree of highlighting. What’s expressed isn’t that “if nothing we do means anything, then the only thing that means anything is what we do” but instead that “if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do”.
While the scene itself over the course of the conversation conflates mattering with meaning, these things in lived and everyday fact are not the same. What we do can matter without having meaning. We can matter without having meaning.
Does it somehow matter that I am here? That I get up every day, navigate my routines while trying to navigate any unplanned disruption of them, then get up again the next day to do it all over? Sure. I guess. Does it mean anything that I exist, doing all of this? Not in the least. What comes from this, however, is the understanding that had someone else been given my life, it might have both mattered and meant something.
(To be clear: it isn’t my unnoticed absence from Bluesky that makes my life not mean anything. I noted my life is a waste before that even happened. It does underscore the argument, however.)
My life doesn’t mean anything, even if it matters in that basic, fundamental way that anyone’s life does. Even if I knew how to make it mean something, I simply wouldn’t have the physical or psychological resources to do so. This of course is a great way to be while your country is falling to fascist thugs and the presumptive opposition party, rather than in any effective manner actually, you know, opposing anything, instead is actively collaborating.
The notion that the purpose of a system is what it does can be applied to the system that is our own existence, and for all important intents and purposes my system, with its increasing mechanicalness and hopelessness, does little more than merely endure each day, over and over and over again. It arguably matters that it does this, but it doesn’t mean anything that it does this.
If ever my life could have been considered to have had a high point, that point is behind me. Everything from the midlife midpoint is downhill, and everything about my life is guaranteed as a general trend only to get worse from here on out. Someone else probably could have used this life to mean something, to do more than matter simply because anyone who is alive matters just because they are alive. I matter only in that barest minimum of a way.
My life is a waste, and should have been given to somebody else. There’s nothing to be done about that, because even if you surrender yours it can’t be picked up or reassigned. It just gets erased. The only thing to do, and I say this with a sort of sigh of resignation, is try to figure out how to apply some self-compassion just to get me through however many weeks or months or years or decades I have left in a life that means nothing, until it eventually also stops mattering because it ceases to be—when the purpose of my system becomes the feeding of worms.