a portal to pointlessness

A love letter to caring without direction

I've been drinking chamomile tea in the middle of the day. There is a bed in my new office in the house where we are staying, and I flop backwards onto it like a fainting couch. My hours pass, pointlessly.

What is the point of drinking something that’s meant to put you to sleep in the middle of the day? And what’s the point of all the things I find to scroll through on my phone, always something even after a whole year of getting rid of all social media except Reddit, Goodreads/Storygraph¹, and LinkedIn?² No matter what I do, a wall of opinions from strangers finds its way to me.³ Trying to escape the deluge of hot takes - it’s pointless. My favorite podcasts? Absolutely pointless, full of analyses of bad reality TV and C-list celebrities. My interests? Well let’s just say I retain more information about Housewives and skincare products and which celebrities are now gay than I care to share. I am the smart young woman⁴ to whom progressive boomer white men love to say “why do you want to waste your intelligence caring about that?”, typically after I’ve gone on a screed about the Kardashians.

These pointless things we care about - Gaylor conspiracy theories, The Golden Bachelorette, those slime videos on Youtube⁵, where we are on the constant ebb and flow of denim trends⁶, Chappell Roan’s media strategy. Pointless, all of it. These things point nowhere besides right back at us, in the end. But if the first keyword is pointless, then the second key word is care. It is better to care about something than to care about nothing. I actually believe we need to care to stay alive. Caring, though, right now - it hurts. We keep getting our hearts broken about everything, from a presidential election that is infuriating and dangerous, to unstoppable fires wrecking all that was once green, to a new school shooting every day, to constant attacks on trans lives. We care, we’ve been caring, but we can only care so much. So we point our care elsewhere, somewhere that hurts less, somewhere soft. Pointless.

The opposite of pointless is… pointy. Why would we want something to be pointy? If something is pointless, it is soft and round and plush and it can’t hurt you. It points towards nothing. It encompasses. It’s a mug of tea and a chair and the rain outside the window and nothing, nothing at all to do. My dog is the most pointless creature you could imagine, and he’s everything to me.

the whole point

Careful. That’s pointy. That’s sharp. You’re so full of care that you’ll never make it out alive if you keep caring in the way you have been. So you relax into what is pointless. You make a way through the day that might be directionless, but it is your own and it isn’t sharp and it doesn’t scare you and it won’t hurt you. Maybe, tomorrow, you’ll choose something to do with your day that points forward. Maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll once again meander the same route with your dog, too slowly to consider it walking, listening to pointless podcasts and sending pointless memes to your friends.

The whole first part of my life I thought there had to be a point to me. But I don’t exist for a purpose, or at least not in the way I’d been thinking I should. Right now, my pointlessness points nowhere that I know about, but just because I don’t know about it doesn’t mean it’s not there. Maybe my pointlessness is going somewhere. Maybe it’s not. I’m not really pointing anywhere, and I am soft, and all of the sharp, sharp arrows I spent so long firing are gone and I will not make more. Er, I’ll try not to.

This is irregular basis. It’s pointless. I made myself sit down and write 500 pointless words just so that I would start. I wound up with 778. Welcome!

1. The two most important social medias.

2. lol, more on that another time. LinkedIn is the most post-apocalyptic place on the internet.

3. Ask me how I feel about Substack notes. Fuck me, I’m going to have to start doing Substack notes if I want anyone to read anything I write, aren’t I?

4.  Only boomers refer to me as this. I am 31 years old.

5. I keep threatening my wife that I’m going to buy one someday. Send recs.

6. Don’t tell me, I am only wearing soft pants this winter anyways.