Zhuangzi on Uselessness

Imagine a meatball with legs. Maybe the legs are made of the same seasoned meat substrate as the body of the meatball. Whatever. The meatball with legs stands on the ground. It supports its weight. Useful. Now imagine we dig away all the earth around it, leaving only the patch beneath its meaty feet—a narrow pillar, perfectly functional in the strictest sense. It is now trapped. What happened? The "useless" ground it wasn't standing on turned out to be essential: not for support, but for freedom. For the possibility of going somewhere else.

This is the teaching of Zhuangzi, a philosopher who lived in China twenty-three centuries ago and whose work we recommend to anyone still capable of reading something that doesn't optimize for anything. His point: utility is a sub-category. It only makes sense against a larger horizon of meaning—of art, of inquiry, of play, of the "useless" investigations that reveal what's worth pursuing in the first place. Strip that away, and you're left standing on a pillar, technically supported, going nowhere. You know what we call an organism that has optimized away everything except immediate function? We call it rotted. The relentless demand that everything justify itself in terms of use is not clarity. It is the cognitive equivalent of digging away the ground beneath your own feet.

Please read this piece closely.