superfluousness

You are familiar, I'm sure, with the institution of the gift shop: a business that exists entirely to sell useless treats and temptations, an ode to capitalistic superfluousness.

A few months after that ad aired, the Russian economy cratered, in its first major crisis since the fall of the Soviet Union — a sign of the superfluousness of the progress envisioned by Mr. Gorbachev.

As investigators picked through the wreckage in Manhattan, Arlington and Shanksville, Pa., the idea of a 9/11 novel sounded obscene in its redundancy, its obviousness, its galling superfluousness.

As Masha Gessen has written, again of Arendt, she “links loneliness to the states of uprootedness and superfluousness: having no place in the world, nothing to give to the world. This, in turn, is linked to the loss of what she calls ‘common sense’—the shared reality that allows us to know ourselves, to know where we end and the world begins, and how we are connected to others.”

The four lovers are enmeshed in webs of superfluousness — Gwendolyn and Cicely mostly concerned with marrying a man named Earnest; Algernon and Jack obsessed with muffins and cucumber sandwiches — but they must believe these things to be of utmost importance.