system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What advice would Laozi or a Taosit give to a young person struggling to find meaningful work?
gpt
Embrace uselessness. 

There's a tree down the street that's a marvelously large oak. It shields so many birds, so many squirrels, so many ant colonies, so many fungi, so many mistletoe bushes, so many children who like to read books or play tag around the tree. It is a very useful tree. It is also very useful for its wood. People pay a lot of money to find large trees like that, go great distances to locate them, pay more money to hire people with trucks and saws, and cut them down. The wood is excellent for ornamental displays, like clocks or mantel pieces or lathed bowls. The usefulness of the tree attracts many admirers and consumers; the usefulness of the tree brings its death and its new immortality.

There's a different tree, though. It's been sitting over there by the dump, near the train tracks, where the two multimodal containers stay sitting on rails displaying local gang politics. The tree is wretched. It has gnarls. Its leaves are wasted, black, and thin, too thin to provide any shade. The roots are reprehensible, and no sap from them attracts hornets or flies. And since the location where it sits is so unusable and unattractive to humans, there it continues to sit, undisturbed, unwanted, unneeded.

There it will die, and remain, for a long time, continuing even in tree death to be useless, as useless as the land around it, as useless as humans think it is.

For humans only consume what they think is useful, meaningful in its being used, meaningful for being used.

The rest, all the waste and inefficient and gnarled things, those hard scrabbly things satisfied with living alone, all that rest is left alone.

There is no struggle if there's no need for meaning. There is peace in being useless.