Uselessness is useful

“What for?”

I believe this short and simple question is the best way to define our modern era.

We are so much used to think in terms of “what for” that we do not even realize which are the implications and consequences.

Almost every decision in our lives, from the small ones of daily routines to the major ones of policy makers, pass through that question.

We are in, what I like to call, the “era of utility” in the sense that we assign values to everything and everybody according to their usefulness.

People are valued based on their utility in producing good, services or profits. In fact, when we meet a new person, the first question is always about his/her job because knowing what someone does for living is an indication of his/her usefulness.

Even art is now useful to the point that it is a major form of investment.

We are so bound to such thinking that we are creating needs only to justify useless things or actions and relieve us from the general guilty feeling associated to uselessness.

But it has not been always like that. In the past, not everything was subject to a utility check, certainly material things for the basic needs were but not much more than that.

Arts did not have a value based on utilization, but they were appreciated for their being, for the useless aesthetic and in fact artists were notoriously penniless, on the contrary of today.

People were valued not according to their job but on their behavior within the community, their honorability and trustworthiness.

According to most philosophers, the change started during the second world war and it continued to develop strongly till today supported by the consumerism.

Is uselessness really so bad that has to be avoided at any cost? I don’t think so, in particular nowadays.

I don’t think usefulness is negative, in fact it has brought health and wealth to the world, just it should not be the only way we are able to live our life. We need also to think in useless terms.

Because we are not only rational, we have to feed also our irrationality and the best way to do it is spending time with things that have no use other than being what they are.

Me writing this page is useless, I am not being paid for it, I am not aiming to attract readers, I am not looking for anything else than my own pleasant thinking and writing moments and I am still doing it.

The same when I go diving, there is no utility for me to go underwater other than contemplate the marine life and being weightless.

As matter of fact, I definitely need all the useless writing, reading, scuba diving, photographing and videos shooting because without all that I would be just an aggregate of tissues.

Life is not about what is useful, but it is about all those useless moments and things that we dedicate to our irrationality.

We are like carpenters walking in a forest while we instead should try to be poets and painters who in the forest see trees around them and not planks and furniture.

Usefulness is useful to our being humans.