Chap 4 of LIFE AS PLAY (audio and full text). Reading time: 10 min

Listen to the full audio of this chapter here:

1–WHAT ARE CATS FOR?

What are dogs for? Dogs work, they guard the house, they play with kids, they assist the blind, provide companionship, and sniff out drugs. Dogs do pretty much anything we ask them to do. King Frederick II of Prussia apparently said that,

“the only, absolute and best friend a man has, in this selfish world, the only one that will not betray or deny him, is his dog.”

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Cows? Cows make milk. Cattle give us beef. Pigs provide pork. Bees produce honey and regulate the ecosystem. And where would we be without horses?

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How about cats? What purpose does a cat serve? They prowl, they purr, they play, hunt the occasional rodent, and they sleep a lot. In the film ‘Babe,’ the cat claims that their sole purpose is to be beautiful and loving. But I’ve seen ugly cats. And loving, for a cat, is an overstatement. What cats love is their freedom. And food.

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So, what are cats for? That question can be applied to many things. What is art for? What is dancing for? What are babies for? What are seniors for? Our utilitarian framework quickly falls short. And yet, this mindset dictates how we allocate public funds, organize our societies, and treat each other. It’s this framework we use to think and perceive the world.

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Some might blame capitalism or consumerism. But it’s deeper than any political system or social paradigm. So, let’s see what cats could be for.

2–COMMODITIES

Marketing 101: to sell a product, discard its features and focus on the consumers’ benefits. If you sell someone a smartphone, don’t tell them how many million pixels it has. 10,000 or 10 million pixels? What for? But convert those pixels into tangible benefits for the consumer, and you have their attention.

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‘What for?’ is a legitimate question. In our world, each ‘thing’ does ‘something’ that makes it useful to us.

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Problems arise when we apply marketing principles to the world. By commodifying the world, by reducing every being to its practical use, we turn the world into a convenience store. If an item on the shelf doesn’t serve a purpose, we either discard it or eradicate it.

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We commodify each other. We place humans in two categories: useful and/or disposable.

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Whether in daily interactions or in intimate relationships, we commodify beings according to our needs. I need you to make me happy. I need you to do this so that I can feel like that. Our relationships are utilitarian, ‘Where is this relationship/interaction/discussion going?’ If it’s not going anywhere, why pursue it? Social media, of course, takes this commodification to a whole new level.

👯‍♀️

We commodify ourselves. We define ourselves through roles and functions, what we are for: our roles on a team, in a company, in a family. As Alan de Botton points out in Status Anxiety, the first question we’re asked when meeting someone at a party is ‘What do you do?’ Based on our answer, the person will either deem us worthy of their interest or leave us by the nuts.

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Cats can’t be commodified. You can’t dress them up or get them to do anything. Which leads us to the next question: what needs do cats fulfill?

3–NEEDS

Who ‘needs’ a cat?

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According to Maslow’s pyramid of needs (1943), humans have basic needs and higher-level needs.

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We have physiological needs (food and shelter) before safety needs (stability and protection). Once we’ve met those, we can move on to love (relationships, belonging to a group) and esteem. At top of the pyramid lie the luxury needs (personal growth and fulfillment).

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Cats defy Maslow’s pyramid. They can’t be eaten, and they don’t protect. Do cats love anyone? Do they boost anyone’s esteem? Somehow, cats have managed to remain, despite their apparent uselessness. Cats are like plants: we feed them and get nothing in return. Yet, plants enliven a room. Cats don’t do shit.

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In a world of needs, cats, art, play, and spirituality are deemed superfluous distractions. Who ‘needs’ kindness? What’s it for? Why be compassionate? What’s there to get from it? In Maslow’s pyramid, compassion and kindness are only a means to an end. Media and advertising commodify compassion as a sales pitch. Beyond that, compassion and kindness are useless.

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Perhaps needs aren’t the healthiest way to approach life.

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In higher education, bachelor students are summoned to prepare job interviews. One of the initial textbook questions is What do I want/need from a job? But here’s another question: What do I have to offer? This question flips Maslow’s pyramid. Instead of viewing the world through a needy, egoic self, we see the world as a potluck to which we bring our unique contribution.

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According to Maslow, food trumps faith. But consider the opposite. Stories have been told about faith keeping people alive in the most extreme conditions. Survival hung on hope, not sustenance. As suicide rates skyrocket in our modern day world, it certainly isn’t due to any lack of food or shelter.

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So, who needs a cat? Nobody. Needs don’t solve our cat conundrum either. What are cats for?

4–WHAT FOR?

What’s meditation for? Someone said that meditation was more a process than a goal-oriented activity. Could all activities be considered as a goalless process?

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Children (before receiving smartphones) live in the moment, enjoying the activity for the sake of it, for the pleasure of the doing. They dread having to abandon their play to come eat or go to bed.

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At what age do we lose that lust for life? At what age does ‘What for?’ color everything we do? Drawing for the pleasure of drawing. Reading the same story twenty times. Carried from one activity to the next. Life in the present moment is naturally playful.

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Why do we make children, create art, have relationships, or launch businesses? What for? Does the world need another human, another piece of art, another startup? The only purpose is play. Any ulterior motive — recognition, status, money — will only ruin the fun.

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That sounds nice, but I work because I have bills to pay and children to raise.

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Fair enough. But common wisdom tells us to find a job we love, and we’ll never have to work a day of our life. Or, to paraphrase Chuck Palahniuk, we work in jobs we hate to buy stuff we don’t need in order to impress people we don’t like. That’s our daily grid.

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Bless cats for not doing any of that.

5–MEANING

Cats make us reconsider our metaphors. The utilitarian perspective considers the world as a machine, a mechanism, a factory. In a factory, each person performs a specific task and thereby contributes to the whole. Each part is functional. A machine is efficient.

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That’s our current model. Medicine sees the human body as a machine that can be hacked, doctored, and tampered with like an old Volvo. Who needs a second kidney if you only need one to survive?

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Let’s consider another metaphor.

When we look at the Mona Lisa, no one asks ‘what is that element in the background for?’ Elements in the fresco don’t need a function, and yet they’re interconnected, there’s an interplay. The work of art wouldn’t be the same without any of its components. We don’t judge a fresco with a utilitarian mindset. We appreciate its beauty as a whole.

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Cats don’t have a function and they don’t carry any meaning. But they’re part of the fresco. A fresco doesn’t have or need a meaning.

✉️

In a recent letter by Nick Cave, the songwriter explains:

I once felt the path of existence was entirely random and unplanned, but now I am not so sure. At this stage in my life I feel these contingent decisions are amounting to something, that destiny is at work and, as the pieces fall mysteriously into place, that there is some sort of ultimate meaning. Life appears not random at all but part of a superior system, where the sum of these intuitions have an order, a greater purpose, an eventual orientation beyond what we ourselves can perceive. Even in the whorl of our own personal tragedies, when the cosmos appears at its most chaotic and impartial, I have come to see the world, in its complexity, rearranging itself toward meaning.

6–CONCLUSION

Cats don’t fit our utilitarian model. Good for them. Their inadequacy is a statement. It highlights the inadequacy of our framework.

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Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi praised uselessness. In one of his parables, he tells the story of an old tree that was too twisted and split to be used for anything. A carpenter encounters the tree and deems it worthless lumber. For the tree, this is a blessing. While useful trees get chopped down, the useless tree survives and ends up providing shade for generations of travelers who come to bless its existence. There is more to life than utility.

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Does a rainbow need each one of its colors? No. But without them, it wouldn’t be a rainbow. And what the fuck are rainbows for, anyway?

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Maybe cats wonder what humans are for. Doesn’t the saying tell us that Dogs have owners, but cats have staff?