Documented: Zhuangzi chapter 20, The Mountain Tree, pairs the episodes in one day, the crooked tree no carpenter will touch, thriving by uselessness, then the friend's farm where the goose that cannot cackle is chosen for the pot precisely because it is useless. The disciple's question and Zhuangzi's answer are in the text: dwell between worthy and worthless, and even that is only a stalling tactic unless you forget praise and blame altogether and follow change.
The reading the chapter forces: Zhuangzi will not let uselessness become a strategy, a strategy is a usefulness, and the goose shows that any fixed position is a target. The Daoist answer is not be useless but be unpin-downable, drift with the situation, which is why the chapter ends with Zhuangzi himself being chased by a gamekeeper for poaching a magpie's distraction.
The modern resonance: chapter 20 circulates now as the anti-hustle classic, the answer to optimize-or-perish culture. The text is darker than the self-help version: it does not promise that opting out saves you, only that optimizing guarantees the axe, the talented and trained are the first consumed. Between worthy and worthless is a verdict on careers, not a life hack.
If both the useful and the useless get eaten, what exactly is the lesson?