On Silliness and Absurdity: My Serious Philosophy on Unseriousness

The Raw and Feral Manifesto

Organizing Sit Club as a parody of Run Clubs, plastering cryptic bean-themed posters around the city, distributing free stickers that meme tech leaders - what do all these projects have in common?

They are completely and utterly pointless.

tech daddy stickers

When hearing about my schemes, people always ask what the purpose is. After the “successful” ones, I’m encouraged to monetize them and repeat them.

Because in our capitalist society, every skill must be leveraged to make money. Every pastime must be selected and perfected to look good on a college app or resume.

We judge the value of an endeavor by its end result. But *wanting* that result is a feeling that could consume you for days, for years, for your entire life, while *having* achieved it is come and gone in a moment.

And so life goes by in the *wanting* and not the *having.*

Wouldn’t it be better if the wanting and the having were the same? If the enjoyment and purpose came from the process of an action, not its completion?

A few events shaped my perspective on this. As a kid, I got into a lot of trouble from challenging authority and doing things my own way. (Actually, in the way that parents casually break news that in a moment reshapes your entire perception of self, my mom only recently told me I was diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder as a child. So I rejected authority, clinically.) But I was also very competitive, and so I regrettably fell in line with the rat race of get-into-a-good-college, get-good-internships, land-a-prestigious-job, climb-the-corporate-ladder, then die. Blinders on, locked in on this path, measuring everything I did by how it would help me reach these goals. And it’s a frustrating, unfair path, where most results come from luck, but you expect and are expected to achieve them by working harder. There was always something greater to aspire to, or a self-inflicted need to prove yourself after a perceived shortcoming.

I was moderately successful with this path. I got into a good college, continued grinding to get into the business major (at my university, students apply their sophomore year), I was accepted, then the pandemic hit. Without another clear milestone to immediately strive for, I felt restless, dissecting every failure in my past, since there wasn’t another goal to whip myself toward.

I eventually channeled that energy into something useful, and founded a nonprofit that provided free virtual extracurricular classes to 5,000 kids across 45 countries, taught by 400 college student volunteers. This felt like the first real thing I did with my life, something I did purely because it was a cause I was passionate about, outside the prescribed path of “success.”

I learned so much about starting a business, and also about the depth of my obsessive nature. Every second I was awake, I was working on it, thinking about it, stressing about it. I’d have a dozen false starts to sleep, as I’d grab my phone to jot down an idea, draft a message, note a to-do. I dreamed about it. Every minor mishap ravaged my sympathetic nervous system. But every achievement made me dizzy with pride, and the ups and downs were addicting. Nothing feels as good as obsession - isn’t that the core of all hedonistic pursuits, all pleasure? And this was for work I made no money off of, completely voluntary. Although I learned how good it felt to do something for the sake of itself, I also learned I should probably never rely on a passion project for my livelihood, because I’d let it eat me up from the inside out.

seeing myself on TV was pretty f*cking sick tho, ngl

After graduating, I was very lucky to land my “dream job.” I moved to New York and lived in a group house with a dozen or so young people working in the startup sphere. In this community, people didn’t really care where you went to college or what your GPA was - many of them dropped out of college or never went at all. That’s not to say that assessing someone’s status based on their twitter followers or number of beta signups is better, but it was different, at least. Success wasn’t as rigidly defined, and so there wasn’t as clear of a hierarchy to climb in this universe.

Meanwhile, I had a terrible experience at my dream job. My manager actively tried to throw me under the bus, then run me over with the bus, then back up to hit me again with the bus, and prior to that had tied me down to the road under the bus, etc. This job represented everything I’d been chasing after. I felt I’d lived a life of always getting second place - too close to complain, but never what I wanted most - and this job was the first time I won. But it wasn’t just underwhelming, it sucked. And no matter how many late nights I worked or how much I energy I poured in or how I dropped everything else in my life to focus on work, it continued to suck. My quarter-life crisis ensued, trying to find meaning in all this.

My housemate/friend Michelle was a significant inspiration to me. After her internship told her she couldn’t take a vacation they’d previously approved or they’d fire her, she quit, took that vacation, and found a new internship a week later. My new mantra became: jobs are replaceable, years of your life are not. We dubbed ourselves “Overachievers Anonymous,” reminding each other to “underachieve” and stop thinking of work as life-or-death. Do your job well, but don’t destroy yourself over it.

I sought fulfillment in things that were unrelated to work - art, friendships, and of course schemes. The latter were particularly delightful, because they were so antithetical to what I had been conditioned to value - these projects would add absolutely nothing to my resume!

My housemate/friend Emily and I held Soupsgiving (Thanksgiving but all the dishes are soup), made clay figurines of all our housemates and took them on a photoshoot, the girls made a surprisingly-aesthetic tampon curtain to claim the women’s bathroom, we created a shrine to our housemate who’d been on a lengthy vacation away, we made up and played silly games, and I listed our house on Google Maps as Mehran’s Steak House after our housemate who cooked great steaks, in what would later snowball into a viral international sensation, covered by the New York Times, BBC, ABC, CBC, and all the other three-letter acronyms.

zuccing the city, cardboard guillotine, tampon curtain, historical recreation of Soupsgiving

As miserable as that manager made me, I was ultimately glad for the experience - I was lucky to get what I thought I wanted, and lucky to realize it wasn’t what I wanted at all. I had to reach what I was so desperately chasing after to realize how unfulfilling it was.

I spent more time living in the 5-9 than the 9-5, and using that 5-9 time for things that notably did not benefit the 9-5 at all.

I found that there is something delightfully mischievous in an endeavor that has no end value, in which the purpose is nothing but the act itself. It sparks a child-like joy to turn off the rational, adult brain that says - “this is pointless,” and to think in immediacy and glee - “this is pointless!”

Children are associated with joy, creativity, and freedom from learned societal constraints. They haven’t yet grasped long-term effects, so they live in the moment. While (obviously) we should consider the consequences of our actions, this can become a crippling consideration - we no longer experiment, no longer play, because we’re afraid of being judged, afraid of making mistakes, afraid of looking silly, afraid of “wasting time.” And so it’s safer to do nothing.

So. Could I make money from my schemes? Sure, but that gives them a clear, boring success metric, that you’d compare to any other money-making endeavor, and if the ratio of {time input} to {money output} is less, you’d simply not do them. And it shifts the focus from the creating to the ending, and adds in other people with their own objectives and opinions to conform to. All of which sucks out the joy.

Could I repeat schemes I pull off successfully? Sure, but then the delightful becomes normal and mundane, and it boxes me into a niche, rather than challenging me to explore the bounds of what I’m capable of.

Could I quit my job and focus on this full time? Sure, but I’d be incapable of caring about it a healthy amount, and would hedonistically let it consume me in some grotesque Nosferatu freaky demon way.

Usually, when people ask these questions on why I do the things I do, I give some flippant answer - “cuz it’s funny.” Because the honest reason takes 1,600 words to describe, is an 8 minute read according to Substack, and is much more earnest than a justification for schemes has any right to be.

interpretive dancing in a hazmat suit to an animatronic self-driving muppet in front of 300+ people who spent a month solving our scavenger hunt