Our culture values striving, purpose, achievement, and accumulation. This book asks us to get sidetracked along the way. It praises aimlessness as a source of creativity and an alternative to the demand for linear, efficient, instrumentalist thinking and productivity.Aimlessness collects ideas and stories from around the world that value indirection, wandering, getting lost, waiting, meandering, lingering, sitting, laying about, daydreaming, and other ways to be open to possibility, chaos, and multiplicity. Tom Lutz considers aimlessness as a fundamental human proclivity and method, one that has been vilified by modern industrial societies but celebrated by many religious traditions, philosophers, writers, and artists. He roams a circular path that snakes and forks down sideroads, traipsing through modernist art, nomadic life, slacker comedies, drugs, travel, nirvana, and oblivion. The book is structured as a recursive, disjunctive spiral of short sections, a collage of narrative, anecdotal, analytic, and lyrical passages-intended to be read aimlessly, to wind up someplace unexpected.

Aimlessness: An IntroductionAimlessness and Literature I: The EssayAimlessness and Literature II: PoetryAimlessness and Collage I: Out of ControlAimlessness and the Nomad I: Deleuze and GuattariAimlessness and Method I: Definitions and DisclaimersAimlessness and the Nomad II: Lyotard and Genghis KhanAimlessness and Collage II: Tokarczuk, Nietzsche, MorrisAimlessness and Collage III: The EncyclopediaAimlessness and Travel I: The HorizonAimlessness and Idleness I: Nietzsche, Adorno, and Idle WorkAimlessness and Life I: Drugs and Self-DoubtAimlessness and Literature III: The NovelAimlessness and Travel II: Bad RoadAimlessness and DeathAimlessness and Life II: IntimacyAimlessness and Method II: Gertrude Stein, Jan Zwicky, Lao TzuAimlessness and Life III: StagesAimlessness and Travel III: IntentionAimlessness and Idleness II: WorkaholicismAimlessness and Attention I: The Stream of ConsciousnessAimlessness and the Nomad III: Vehicle and TenorAimlessness and Attention II: ExcellenceAimlessness and Idleness III: RestlessnessAimlessness and Method III: The EndAimlessness and Attention III: And ThenAcknowledgmentsWorks CitedIndex