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The Beauty of Useless Things

  • Writer: Adriane Barroso
    Adriane Barroso
  • Jul 19
  • 2 min read

Adriane Barroso, Ph.D.


There is a quiet rebellion in making something for no other reason than love. Not so that you might be good at it. Not so that you'll sell it, share it, or show anyone at all. The idea of merely doing it because it calls to you, like words for a poem, movement for a song, patterns for a page.


We live in a utility-mad world. "Productivity" is a cult in itself. Everything, including happiness, is meant for optimization. Still, the beauty of useless things—that genuine, unwarranted, unprofitable beauty—remains. It remains and persists because something within us refuses to live by output alone.


I am fond of these inconsequential things: for playing the music misely in empty rooms, for poems un-read, for photographs taken and left unremembered, for the personal rites and idiosyncratic enthusiasms which make us secretly, obstinately ourselves. What is life for, if not for finding time to be a little bit wasted?


Beauty must be created, regardless of any witness.


I recall the tiny things that my daughter creates, crumples, and leaves behind. I think of my recent attempts at playing the tambourine, and how I keep playing just for the feel of the beat in my body. None of it "matters", not like a spreadsheet or an invoice. But to create beauty with no endpoint is to grasp for something ancient, youthful, and proudly free within us. There's a reason we care about sunsets and not just solar panels; we pay for concerts and not quiet time; we turn to poetry and not the calendar when the rest is junk. Desire is an inefficient, wasteful proposition. It doesn't necessarily make us better, richer, wiser. It makes us more human.

A young person sits in a sunlit room playing guitar, surrounded by scattered art supplies, a sketchbook, and a vase with a wilting flower—capturing the beauty of doing things for love, not productivity.
Creating Beauty

Against the Cult of "Useful", an Ode To the Beauty of Useless Things


This is a defense for the unproductive, the unmarketable, the things we do just because they resonate in us. They're our proof of life. They're what keeps us somewhat wild, somewhat soft, somewhat in love with the world.


Mental health care shouldn't be about making us better at being functional for the world (Honestly, I hate the term "highly functional" for precisely this reason). Life is for making space for what's most alive in us, even (especially) when it's inconsequential for the world at large.


Waste time. Be bad at something you love. Let that be enough.

--- Adriane






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