Clay pots

A study in futility

Mr. Squishy is a short story by David Foster Wallace. On the surface, it is about the most pointless and boring meeting of all time. But at the end of all the tedious monologues and extensive descriptions and seemingly irrelevant tangents, it becomes clear that the story is instead about something much deeper—it's actually about futility.

And, without exaggeration, this is my greatest fear in life. Mr. Squishy is not particularly exciting or beautifully written or fun to read, but there are parts of it that are gripping, and the story sticks with me, perhaps even haunts me, because it captures the feeling off futility like nothing else I've ever read or seen or heard.

Futility is a Latin word, and it literally means "leaking." Perhaps the best image to convey its meaning is a leaky pot. Think back to Roman times when the word was first used— all they had were pots made of clay. A leaky clay pot cannot be fixed, or patched, or sealed. What is a leaky pot good for? You can't use it to store water. You can't use it to cook, as it will douse the fire you put it over. You can't use it to preserve any food, as bugs and rats will be able to steal from it. A leaky pot is good for nothing. No matter how much you try to fill it up, it will always spill its contents. It will forever amount to nothing of any value.

The Story

But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, let me tell you what Mr. Squishy is about.

It's 1995. A group of men have been assembled in a nameless conference room on the nineteenth floor of a nondescript office building, as part of a focus group on a new product.

Mister Squishy is the name of the confectionery company that's sponsoring the whole thing. They make super sweet snacks loaded with preservatives and sell them in gas stations and in checkout lanes at grocery stores. Think Hostess Twinkies. The new product is called:

"Felonies!®—a risky and multivalent trade name meant both to connote and to parody the modern health-conscious consumer’s sense of vice/indulgence/transgression/sin vis à vis the consumption of a high-calorie corporate snack....

Felonies! were all-chocolate, filling and icing and cake as well, and in fact all-real-or-fondant-chocolate instead of the usual hydrogenated cocoa and high-F corn syrup, Felonies! conceived thus less as a variant on rivals’ Zingers, Ding Dongs, Ho Hos, and Choco-Diles than as a radical upscaling and re-visioning of same."

Mister Squishy has hired a marketing company, Reesemeyer Shannon Belt Advertising (RSB), to help them design their new product and its associated marketing campaign. RSB has in turn hired another firm, Team Delta Y, to help them conduct research for the project, specifically, to conduct focus groups and collect data on consumer's reactions to the proposed product. Their processes are incredibly intricate, almost to the point of being obtuse—requiring the coordination of multiple departments within the firm, and complex statistical calculations, and high-powered computers on which to run them—all in order to determine whether Felonies! will be a hit or not, so they can decide whether to pull the trigger on manufacturing and distribution and advertising and so on.

This particular focus group is led by Terry Schmidt, 34 years old, overweight, pale, and socially awkward, "with a helmetish haircut and a smile that always looked pained no matter how real the cheer." He lives alone, and in his free time watches satellite TV, collects rare coins, and "power-walks on a treadmill in a line of eighteen identical treadmills on the mezzanine-level CardioDeck of a Bally Total Fitness." Moreover, Schmidt is obsessed with his coworker Darlene Lilly, who is married, who thinks of him as only a friend, and who is completely oblivious to his interests. Schmidt has never had the guts to tell her how he really feels, though he fantasizes about her every night.

There's a lot more going on in the story, but the saddest part, and the realest, at least to me, is the part about Schmidt's life. And not just his life, but the entire enterprise that he belongs to is in fact a multi-level construct where each layer is more futile than the last.

Layers

Fundamentally the gap in Schmidt's life is the difference between his reach and his grasp. All Schmidt wants to do is "make a difference in the world." It's all he ever wanted to do. When he first graduated from college and started his career in statistics, he was filled with ambition, something he thought made him special, but:

"In Terry Schmidt’s case a certain amount of introspection and psychotherapy ... had enabled him to understand that his professional fantasies were not in the main all that unique, that a large percentage of bright young men and women locate the impetus behind their career choice in the belief that they are fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior...and that they can and will make a difference in their chosen field simply by the fact of their unique and central presence in it."

But he hasn't given up all hope yet, he still clings to the aspiration. So he worked his way from job to job until finally landing at Team Delta Y, where he's now been for eight years. And today he's leading this focus group with the same energy he had from the beginning, the same idealism and vivacity, although perhaps a bit flagging, since this is just one of thousands of nearly identical presentations. But he can't give up now, not when he might be so close to finally getting that promotion, and then at long last to actually have a say in the corporate direction of Team Delta Y. And his dreams are still greater, as he also fantasizes that one day he'll be able to start his own research firm, and he has complex daydreams about making bold pitches to rich executives that will change the course of their companies, and maybe even make marketing history like the stories he studied in school.

But this meeting is a little different, because a realization is dawning on Schmidt, despite his attempts to suppress it. And as he gives his little spiel to the 14 members of the focus group, though he appears to be engaged and upbeat and not-at-all-rehearsed, he has in fact done this so many times that he can do it on autopilot, and simultaneously his mind is churning in the background, fretting over this terrifying epiphany, which seems to be both imminent and unavoidable.

Because, if he's truly honest with himself, despite his huge ambitions and his best attempts to achieve them, across the last decade or so the signs have not been very promising. Not at all. People who are less qualified than him are getting promoted before him. He's not progressing any more. It's still the same old thing for him at Team Delta Y, and he's getting older. Sometimes he has waking nightmares that he will do "precisely the same series of things in preparation for the exact same job he had been doing now for eight years."

The realization of his futility is beginning to take hold of him, and he can't shake it. But it's not just about doing the same job for years and never getting the promotion. There are more layers to unpeel.

First, the focus group itself is pointless. All the men who have been brought here today have their "faces arranged in the mildly sullen expressions of consumers who have never once questioned their entitlement to satisfaction or meaning [and they] had never been hungry a day in their lives." They don't care about this product, they only care about themselves. And in fact they are beginning to grow frustrated at being kept in the meeting for so long and having to listen to Schmidt ramble on and on about the new product. No one wants to be here.

And Schmidt also knows deep down that he will never get promoted, because he doesn't fit in. He's too nerdy and socially awkward. What he doesn't know, but probably understands intuitively, is that everyone talks about him behind his back, saying things like he's "a ’70s yearbook photo come to life." And people "whom Terry’d worked with for years have trouble recalling his name." He's got no chance at the promotion.

And even if he did get promoted:

"even if the almost vanishingly unlikely were to happen...the only substantive difference would be that he would receive a larger share of Team Delta Y’s after-tax profits and so would be able to afford a nicer and better-appointed condominium to masturbate himself to sleep in and more of the props and surface pretenses of someone truly important but really he wouldn’t be important, he would make no more substantive difference in the larger scheme of things than he did now."

Moreover, as Schmidt himself admits, "the Focus Groups made little difference in the long run—the only true test was real sales." These complex and intricate processes are merely there to collect data that Team Delta Y can shape and reshape at will, in order to provide the results that RSB and Mister Squishy want in the first place—results that confirm that Felonies! will be a success. They are too far invested in the product already; it's too late to change. They just want numbers to prove their decision ex-post-facto. And this isn't the only case of this kind of pointless arrangement between the three companies, Team Delta Y has been doing this for years with many of its other customers. And so Schmidt knows that his company as a whole is sham.

What's worse is that with the coming internet revolution (this is 1995, remember), Team Delta Y is already planning to focus on the much more accurate and easier-to-obtain data available from online advertising and click-thrus and cookies. And focus group facilitators like Schmidt will be laid off in droves because it just doesn't make sense, not anymore, to bring a bunch a people into a room and subject them to monologues and surveys and group discussions for an entire day.

And to take it another layer higher, the whole premise of marketing (at least in this industry) is pointless anyways. Because all of these (very American) consumers have never ever questioned their entitlement to pleasure, and in all honestly have absolutely no brand loyalty whatsoever; it's really just about what's available at hand (literally) and what strikes the fancy in the moment. And the market is run by fads and trends anyways, and it's nearly impossible to predict what will work or not, and even if it does work, whether it will stay popular for very long. So even a well-designed product (like Felonies!) and a powerful marketing campaign may make no impact on consumers in the grand scheme.

Schmidt thinks to himself:

"no no all that ever changed [in marketing] were the jargon and mechanisms and gilt rococo with which everyone in the whole huge blind grinding mechanism conspired to convince each other that they could figure out how to give the paying customer what they could prove he could be persuaded to believe he wanted, without anybody once ever saying stop a second or pointing out the absurdity of calling what they were doing collecting information or ever even saying aloud..."

Perhaps marketing serves a genuine purpose in a situation and an industry where people desperately need access to some good or service, but are unfortunately ignorant of the solution, and will suffer greatly unless someone tells them about it. But in the vast majority of cases—of convincing people that they must have something that they currently don't even know that they want, and that if they get it, it will be the secret to their success and happiness and, yes, even true love—is marketing really a positive good to society? And when does peddling chocolates become not only unhelpful, but positively detrimental, even insidious? Promising succulent sweetness and a brief reprieve and a well-earned reward, but giving only a foreshortened and one-dimensional high, followed by the need for more, and still more, then addiction or compulsion, and a declining health, obesity, diabetes, depression, and so on. What really is this meeting about?

And so the whole thing, from top to bottom, is useless and meaningless and utterly futile. And Schmidt is starting to realize this, right here, right now, in the middle of the meeting, even as he is still in the midst of giving his presentation. It’s becoming clear now that he will never be able to make a difference, neither at his career which he has poured all his effort and ambitions into for over a decade, nor outside of work by getting involved in programs like Big Brothers Big Sisters, which turned out to be a total disaster and a massive waste of time and money, and actually just an embarrassment for Schmidt, nor even in his love live, or lack thereof, because he’ll never have the balls to ask her out, and if he did, she would probably laugh in his face at the absurdity of the proposal.

There just doesn't seem to be any way out. And this situation isn’t new, it’s been the same for a long time now; it’s just the heavy weight of the realization that’s novel. The only thing that does change from year to year is that Schmidt is getting fatter:

"Schmidt was sensitive about the way his weight and body fat percentage increased with each passing year, and imagined that there was something about the way he walked that suggested a plump or prissy fat man’s waddle, when in fact his stride was 100% average and unremarkable and nobody except Terry Schmidt had any opinions about his manner of walking one way or the other. "

And just like the fact that they can't remember his name, no one seems to notice or care about him at all, which is somehow even worse than being offensive or repulsive.

And so, to sum it all up, Schmidt has no one, not anyone that he can admit his

"most ghastly private fears and thoughts of failure and impotence and terrible and thoroughgoing smallness within a grinding professional machine you can’t believe you once had the temerity to think you could help change or make a difference or ever be more than a tiny faceless cog in, the shame of being so hungry to make some sort of real impact on an industry that you’d fantasized over and over about ... and doing a job that untold thousands of other bright young men and women could do at least as well as you, or rather now even better than you because at least the younger among them still believed deep inside that they were made for something larger and more central and relevant than shepherding preoccupied men through an abstracted sham-caucus..."

Conclusion

So that's Mr. Squishy. But this is what haunts me about it—Am I any different than Schmidt? Is my life useful? Is it helpful to anyone? Does it make a difference? Or am I just a leaky pot? And everything I belong to, every layer in the machine, is it also pointless? At the end of it all, in the grand scheme of things, in the final analysis, is my life futile?

Most people are afraid of death. I'm not exactly afraid of death, in fact I like living on the edge, and doing dangerous (perhaps foolish) things. But I'm afraid of a particular kind of death—a premature death. A death that ends a life that was meaningless, before I ever had the chance to actually do anything worthwhile and "make a difference." A death that is the final and angry shattering of a leaky clay pot that was of no use to anyone ever.

Those questions above—no one can answer them other than me. And the only way I can answer them is to get up every day, and live my life to the fullest, and constantly show up, and be present, and to put myself at risk, to be exposed, and to always seek the good, and to hate evil and fight weakness, even the weakness that is in myself, the laziness and the cowardice and selfishness and sometimes even apathy and ennui and hopelessness and weltschmerz. I have to prove to myself every day that it's not all futile. That it matters and that even the smallest action can make a difference, however subtle, however small.

But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.

— 2 Corinthians 4:7-9