What's The Point?

Revisiting a ridiculous question.

What is the point of anything is a question I like to ask myself, and my boyfriend to his great irritation. A childish question, sure. Well known as the type you might ask a group of fellow twenty year-olds on the carpet of your college dorm room while sipping your third Natty Light. Decidedly plain and cliche, and yet spaghetti with olive oil is quite possibly my favorite meal, which is to say I’ve never been one to shy away from plain.

Lately (for the past three years?) I’ve been viewing everything through the lens of whether or not to try having a child. And so, with these two questions constantly traipsing around my head, I find myself wondering, should children be the point, like everyone says they are? I imagine that having a child is many things—life-changing, joyful, exhausting, fucking hard—but is surely meaningful, too, a way to focus one’s life when it feels impossible to know what to care about. There is less time to ponder the point when you are wiping applesauce off mouths, pizza grease off chairs, reading stories at bedtime, explaining everything from galaxies to ice cream, and watching the impact of these small tasks snowball into real, live outcomes as your child grows.

And while this sounds like utter existential relief, my thoughts quickly get dark and singular, clamoring to explain why, for me, it also feels wrong and, more specifically, like defeat. I grate at the idea that my point (in my mind) would be whittled down to the service of another, which is not a bad point by any means—to serve others—but I would not be serving someone who happens to need help, I would purposely be creating a human in order to feel helpful. The selfishness and desperation (of my own motivations) feels galling. Not to mention, the cowardice of my deflection, bringing someone into this seemingly pointless world, avoiding the question myself entirely and punting it down the line for my offspring to deal with. 

Of course this shadow-self stream-of-consciousness is not entirely serious—upon having a child your entire self does not flatten into a singular creature of service. That a woman’s entire point might be motherhood is some Handmaid’s Tale level shit; there are billions of points to the world that people harbor and cherish simultaneously. That we must have a single reason for living—a point—is quite dark and also juvenile. It’s a framing for those with a flare for the dramatic, because a point implies an all-consuming reason for one’s existence rather than a collection of passions and pleasures and goals to pursue, or not, which is how most of us live. 

Somehow, though, I’ve always structured my life around that which is all-consuming. It’s just that these areas of focus seem to change every few years, which is exactly why, despite my knowledge that the question is ridiculous, I’m still perpetually drawn to it.

A Brief History of Points:

• When I was a teenager my point was to make M fall in love with me. I attempted to achieve this by giving him blowjobs in secret (it didn’t work and anyway M ended up being gay). And to make my physics teacher believe I was the smartest student in the world. In other words, my point, a recurring one—surely wedged in my little soul far before my teen years—was male approval.

• When I was in college, my point was to graduate and get very rich so that I could pay for said college and not worry about money the way I had growing up, and to buy everyone in my family everything they wanted by pursuing the highest paying major (which also happened to be the one with the least women). And whenever that got too daunting (always), my point was to burn as many calories as possible while eating as little as possible and all the counting and planning and counting and planning made me feel, in the moments between the chaos of classes and computer labs and work study, like staying within my complex, calculated rules was point enough in itself.

• When I was in my mid-twenties and had a job that allowed me to not be utterly terrified of ordering an appetizer or getting a parking ticket, when I’d worked in the corporate world long enough to understand that my title was hardly more than proof of my stamina to comply, and realized that capitalism was essentially a sham not an actual measure of one’s value, I wanted to do something more, to help people who actually needed it. And so my point became to do something “good” with my life, something that actually felt like it mattered. 

• This is easier said than done when your entire mental and emotional framework is built on a scarcity mindset. My life at the time felt like a glass house I was carefully crafting and any small slip-up would crash it all down, so I went to business school (a safe financial bet) to learn about “impact,” and tried to understand how companies really could do good by doing business, a handy belief if you don’t want to sacrifice a salary to feel good about yourself. But it didn’t sit right and I ended up working for nonprofits, which for at least a little while, really did feel like an honest point. But even when I found myself in my dream job, I still felt like a cog, granted in a slightly more helpful wheel, and there were countless issues with the wheel and my place in it, and it felt like this couldn’t be the point.

• In my mid-thirties, I found myself immensely and singularly focused on creating something that could only come from me. Maybe an obvious motivation for anyone who has ever called themselves an artist, but to me felt foreign. The latter half of my thirties was about pursuing connection through creativity. Doing things that, I felt, were distinctly my own as a way to leave some kind of unique mark on the world. Mostly, this was done through writing, but also building my own company. There were a few years where I felt more in tune with myself —a mix of what they call flow and joy and the feeling that you’re really doing what you’re actually supposed to be—than I ever had or have since. 

• But it’s so hard. To make a sustainable financial living creating from one’s own genuine point of view without worrying about clicks and likes and the general approval of the public, and 2020 felt like the beginning of some kind of end. It felt impossible to create, and not only because we were all clinically depressed. In a way that year exposed how little so many things that felt important actually mattered. This played out most prominently in politics, but on a cultural level, it felt like a collective disgust with ourselves—the constant IG lives, opinions and counter-opinions on everything and nothing, an app or an influencer promising to solve anything wrong with you, and everything wrong with the world, too. Creation began to feel gross; just another person piling onto the noise. I’m not sure, as a culture, we’ve really regained our footing since.

• I just wanted to retreat. Thankfully, by the grace of some higher being or maybe just the sweat equity I’d put into dating up to that point, or possibly the fact that I was finally primed for societal withdrawal (surely, a mix of all three), I found myself in my first serious relationship in over a decade that year. And building that, which included having my partner’s child in my life, was my focus. I enjoyed that life (and still do!), more joy than I’ve experienced in a very, very long time. 

• But I also felt as if I’d kind of lost my point.

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Probably clear to anyone reading this, although it evaded me for over twenty years, was that what I’ve been calling my “point” was almost never about how I felt doing something and more about the act of achieving the idea of something.

These days, I have no singular vision for what I want to achieve, which is how many people live, but, to me, feels deeply unsettling. I’m back working as a cog in a wheel (at a wheel I quite like) for financial stability, but I’m no longer interested in climbing the ladder in any way that would look good on LinkedIn, nor do I believe that a company’s good can truly outweigh it’s harm in capitalism. I still love writing, and spend much of my free time doing it, but I don’t believe that if I just work hard enough, I’ll be met with some great success in a system where social media savviness prevails. This results in something like a lack of ambition, but, more accurately, it’s a disinterest in the rewards typically associated with what we call ambition.

Lately, if I had any point at all to articulate, it has been an attempt to be in touch with what actually feels right and good for me specifically. This can mean trying to perfect an essay I’m interested in even if it won’t be read widely, escaping to nature to feel the staggering insignificance of the details we’re told to worry about, or (my favorite) eating abundant quantities of takeout on the couch while binging tv. And frankly—especially if you’ve spent much of your life counting and planning calories—this last one feels amazing. For anyone quick to classify this as depression, let me assure you: The sensation of expanding oneself fully horizontally for extended periods of time and having your favorite food brought to you without having to do nearly any kind of cleanup, while watching human stories play out in front of you, fully releasing all guilt associated with utter relaxation and indulgence, is truly awesome. 

Sadly, this kind of extended lounging gets a bad rap, and it doesn’t take long for the shame to kick in when a woman focuses on her own pleasure. Last week, I declared to Ben that I will be changed by the time I’m back from my upcoming trip—a new person. By which I mean, back to a regular exercise routine, which will, of course, bestow me with boundless energy, deep sleep, and the ability to wake up at six in the morning writing entire chapters before work each day. The notions that routine is salvation and exercise is progress are hard-wired into my brain (despite my lived experience that compulsive exercise is mentally and physically destructive), and so any opportunity to redefine my routine and thus redefine myself entirely feels momentous.

“Why would you try to do all that on your trip?” he asks. 

I am confused and angry at how little he understands. “That’s the whole point!” 

Imagine not needing a point? Ben, for example, just exists. His vision for our trip is hanging in the lake with a noodle and an IPA in hand at all times. Many men I know are perfectly content with just existing. Why, then, do so many women feel the need to prove that their life matters? Surely, it relates to the fact that women’s value for so long was defined by their ability to have children. The perception that, in some sense, women’s own existence has never been their point. Which is surely why I feel so compelled to the opposite.

Most of my inner monologue, even still, is best summed up by the brilliant title of Sheila Heti’s first book, How Should A Person Be? I could probably stop spinning on the question if I wanted to. Throw myself at something so all-consuming that I don’t have time for wandering thoughts, set a routine like I did way back when and distract myself by sticking to the rules. But I quite like the ride of figuring out how to be, as long as I continue to make room for movement in the answer.

And now, since it’s been more than three and a half minutes, I’m back to the question of children. I’m paralyzed by the idea that a child might be looking to me for answers to any of these questions, especially if I’m the person who brought said child into the world. Not because I don’t have something to say, clearly, but because…what if I still prefer being the one asking?