Checkmate!

Don’t demand that everything be useful. The best things in life are useless.

What we need is just prosaic stuff to sustain plain life: Food and drink and maybe shelter, and for that we must work and toil.

Eat to live and live to eat; only food is useful and anything that doesn’t partake in the production of food is useless. But what is the meaning of a life that has no other purpose than staying alive?

That’s why we play; that’s why we want to have fun: To give life meaning.

The more useless, the farther removed from dreary food production, the more fun and the more meaningful.

But the fun should still keep a connection to life or else it forms a separate world and the so-called real life remains as dull as before.

Sports is playing games with the body, so it’s both fun and real. – Art is a game of imitating life and searching for its essence: it’s pleasing and real. – Literature entertains while describing life: it’s amusing and real.

But when fun is not real, it is empty. Hallucinatory drugs are no doubt enjoyable, but then there is nothing more. When waking up from the trance nothing is gained or learned that connects to reality. It is a separate world that is no world at all.

Games, useless as they are, are still meaningful when they connect to the world, but meaningless when the connection fails. When everything is acted out on a board, on eight times eight squares in a square, and no inside logic is relevant outside, no thought reaches beyond that box and all imagination is futile.

Life is not a game of chess. In reality everything connects and the mind knows no boundaries. But lock yourself up behind narrow rules, then: Checkmate!