The Beauty of Useless Things: An Ode to The Things We Do for No Good Reason

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 will sell it, share it, or show anyone at all. Doing things just because it calls to you, the way words call toward a poem or a body moves toward music.

We live in a world that has turned productivity into a cult. Everything, including happiness, is meant to be optimized. And yet the beauty of useless things persists, because something in human beings refuses, stubbornly and without apology, to live by output alone.

I am fond of these inconsequential things. Playing music badly. Poems written and never read. Photographs taken and forgotten, just to capture a moment that you will end up not even revisiting. These private rituals and idiosyncratic enthusiasms make us secretly, obstinately ourselves. What is life for, if not for finding time to be a little wasted?

I think about the small things my daughter makes and crumples and leaves behind without a second thought. I think about my recent attempts to learn to play the tambourine, and how I keep playing not because I am improving (I'm not!), but because the beat moves through my body before I have decided anything about it. None of it matters, not in the way a spreadsheet matters, not in the way an invoice matters. But to make something with no endpoint is to reach for something ancient and youthful and free in us. There is a reason we turn toward sunsets, pay for concerts, reach for poetry when everything else has failed. Desire is an inefficient proposition: it does not make us more productive or more optimized or even wiser. It makes us human.

This is a defense of the unproductive, the unmarketable, the things we do simply because they resonate somewhere we cannot quite locate or explain. They are our proof of life, what keeps us wild, soft, in love with a world that does not always deserve it.

Mental health care, real mental health care, should not be about making people more functional for a world that was already asking too much of them. I have always disliked the term "high function" because it disguises a demand as a compliment. The goal of good therapy is not efficiency. It is not optimization. It is making room for what is most alive in a person, even and especially when that thing is completely inconsequential to anyone else.

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

Creating Beauty

Dr. Adriane Barroso's Bio