The world we live in today is very much geared toward practical results and the effectiveness of actions in achieving objectives. It's a historic moment, a time of difficulties and uselessness, of pragmatism and advantages. It's always good to remember what Epicurus said: The blessed and immortal being is free of worries and doesn't cause them to others, either. Therefore, he doesn't show anger or favouritism, which are characteristics of weakness.

We live so preoccupied, so involved in resolving difficulties that arise all the time, that we rarely stop to observe our own attitudes and understand how they are responsible for many of our annoyances. When we value certain events and situations, we establish priorities; we create values and disvalues, benefits and disbenefits. Obviously, valuing varies from person to person, place to place, and context to context. Values are always adherent and circumstantial. However, they crystallize into broader meanings such as usefulness and uselessness.

Thinking of Epicurus, we can say that everything that is useless is difficult. What is easy, what is useful and necessary for the continuity of life, is always at hand and doesn't need to be sought. When Epicurus thought about these questions of values—useful versus useless, for example—he subordinated them to the natural, the biological, and what was not built, manipulated, or industrialized. This was Greece, where nature reigned supreme: plants, air, and animals.

However, throughout history, tyrants and organizations have appropriated the natural world and used it as raw material to generate chaos. In this way, what is useful and indispensable becomes the object of an incessant search, in a struggle for what is necessary to survive. It's a quest that goes beyond our existence and overtakes it: survival then becomes the negation of humanity itself. We see this clearly in the daily death we witness through hunger and the exhaustion that comes from struggling to stay in the world and walking.

All that matters in survival is what is useful, and that defines pragmatism. What is dilettante and spontaneous is generally considered useless and is soon replaced by something functional. In a world organized in this way, all actions seek to function, to fit together in a way that generates the desired results, and, thus mechanized, human beings are programmed to survive, seeking the useful, which now also becomes their daily difficulty.

Seeking the useful and avoiding the useless is a frequent objective in our social systems and individual experiences. But when we discover that everything that is useful creates waste and needs to be discarded, this discovery generates new signals: the useful becomes useless, just as the useless, depending on recovery, creates utility. This functional and perceptual reversibility generates antagonism and perplexity.

It's a devastating pragmatism, especially in the field of relationships, but it's what's most common, for example, when we see how much “investment” is made in love relationships devoid of authentic feelings and full of visions of their usefulness, whether it's to neutralize loneliness, facilitate social ascension or even establish commitments to raising children! We find these attitudes between couples, between parents and children, and between friends and work colleagues. All of these relationships, which were initiated and perceived as useful for one purpose, can become obstacles for other purposes; they can become useless, and, in other contexts, they can become useful again.

When we introduce values into our experiences, we break relational circuits and establish support and impediments. The reductionism common in the processes responsible for values, for experiencing good and evil, always exhausts, because it divides and fragments processes by establishing directions that are completely alien to events, establishing values, and generating attitudes about what should be sought and what should be rejected or disregarded. This is how immanence is shaken in relational processes. Just think how easy it is to maintain and obtain the essentials for life, such as oxygen, air, and water, which are easy to find and at hand, except in anomalous situations that are unfit for life, such as the difficulty of finding water in deserts or inhaling/exhaling some air when you have congested lungs.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been difficult, even impossible in some cases, to breathe. In situations of illness, as was the case with the pandemic, when oxygen tubes become scarce and disappear, whether due to malpractice or genocidal policies, breathing becomes an impossibility. In situations where the persistence of values and a priori is evident, immanence is denied. Everything is justified by the ends or results, and life itself is perceived as convenient or inconvenient, useful or useless. These attitudes create situations in which circumstances are decisive, and the fundamental thing becomes the residue, the adherence.