Meaningless Work

I have been doing advanced English classes for about 4 years now and If there's one thing that it drills a certain skill into your head: finding messages. A standard essay prompt will ask you to pick out different literary choices made by the author and explain their 4-D chess reasons for putting a comma in the middle of the second paragraph, cause heaven forbid they just felt like it. Maybe they just read it, thought, "I should put a comma there". But noooo, it's because they were trying to show how people often get stuck in the middle of projects cause these people apparently write how Dream plays Minecraft. This has annoyed me since I started having it drilled into my head, and is probably what pushed me towards reading nonfiction books, cause there no "literary style" to just giving information. Anyway, getting back on topic. This is the reason why I love work that intentionally has no meaning behind it, specifically, absurdism.

I've had absurdism explained to me a dozen different ways and none of them make sense, so to explain to some of you who may be unaware. Absurdism is the cousin to the art movement known as dadaism. Have you ever seen that art piece that is literally just writing on a ripped-out

toilet? You probably went, "This is why I hate art" because it is dumb and effortless. You know who else thought that, the person who made it. That art piece was made by people who saw pieces like Jackson Pollock's "Seizure While Holding A Paint Can" and thought the same thing. People decided to then make stupid art pieces to trick pretentious art people into thinking that it had some deeper meaning.

Back to absurdism, this all connects back to the famous play "Waiting for Godot". Waiting for Godot is a play about Estragon and Valdmir, and their shanengins they get up to while they are waiting for their friend Godot. WFG is meant to be one of those plays that is a purely relatable experience. You're supposed to read it and relate to the characters within the play as you've been in their position, but it almost is too relatable. It centers around an activity that is by no means interesting, and we experience far too often to feel like nobody else understands it. Its the equvilant of making a play about driving a car, its doomed to boring. But that's the whole point. WFG was never meant to be a groundbreaking play, it was made to mess with people. Nothing really interesting happens in the play, and you leave it feeling like you wasted your time, just like the characters within the play itself. It was designed with the knowledge that people would try to find meaning in the silence, but wound end up chasing ghosts. It was, as we in the gaming community call, designed through the lense of the meta. That's what makes it interseting.