As long as I’m keeping a running list, cont.

“How to Be Useful” as per 2 Corinthians.

And in common-school education during George III’s reign:

There were no cheap books or newspapers, and no proper system of public instruction. The poor seldom left the counties in which they were born. They knew nothing of what was going on in the world. Their education was wholly of that practical kind which comes from work and things, not from books and teachers; yet many of them with only these simple helps found out two secrets which the highest culture sometimes misses, – how to be useful and how to be happy.

As long as I’m keeping a running list, cont.

Maestronet forums:

“This is a personal thing. Fortunately my food, clothing, shelter and basic violin making needs are covered. I would starve if I had to make violins for a living. I would enjoy making a contribution to knowledge in the field. Folksinger Pete Seeger (90) recently said “I just want to be useful.” I agree with that. My grandchildren will better remember me if I teach them how to be useful.”

Quoting Howard Rheingold:

Just participating isn’t enough. You must have something of value to others.”, “Need to feed (people) what’s valuable to them. To participate you have to learn how not to be boring and how to be useful.”

Character advancement in gaming:

…they adopted a girl from a primitive world, and set about to start teaching her how to be useful aboard ship.

Gamers — saucy. Earlier: Here and here and here.

More yammering about usefulness

During the publicity jag for the How to Be Useful hardcover, an interviewer, reaching into her mail bag, proposed that usefulness wasn’t something serious people aspired to. “What if I don’t want to be useful?” she asked. It was an excellent question, and deserved a more thoughtful answer than the one I gave. (A terse “Better hope you have a trust fund.”)

At its most basic level, wanting to be useful involves changing one’s orientation so that one’s primary question in any endeavor is, simply, how can I help? The few people I’ve spoken to who curl up their lips at the idea see how can I be useful here? as a denial of self. But other people with a more evolved understanding of usefulness, just know that more interesting things happen to them when they try to be useful.

PopTech, where I had the privilege of spending this weekend, was liberally studded with these kinds of people. They had looked around, observed what needs doing, and are attempting to find meaningful solutions. I rather like that some of them have commercial reasons as well for aspiring to usefulness — that being of service, or fulfilling a social need, can translate to piles of money is a theme woven into self-help books and American literature ever since Benjamin Franklin. The moral as discussed in business books tend to boil down to this: If you’re not useful, you won’t make money. If you’d like to make more money, be more useful.

That’s not as crass as it sounds. “Merit makes its way in the world by renting itself out in some marketplace or other, by being of use,” the sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote in 1956’s The Power Elite, before going on to make the point I tried to get at with my trust fund quip: Only the exceedingly wealthy can spurn being useful. The rest of us can’t afford to; we need to get paid.

Now it’s abundantly clear, with plastics finding their way into the stomachs of baby albatrosses and a whole host of worrying developments, that we, collectively, privileged or not, can’t afford to spurn being useful. Complacency is expensive. The U.S. unemployment rate rose to 9.7 percent in September. I really hope these people succeed. I hope they get the chance to employ scads of people. And soon.