The Hitchhiker's Guide to Uselessness

If you’re here for productivity hacks, look elsewhere. I’m about to tell you how being utterly, completely, unapologetically useless might just be the best thing you ever do for yourself. Hold your horses, I can already hear you rolling your eyes—“Useless? But I have goals! I need to hustle, I need to climb the ladder, I need to matter!” And that, my friend, is exactly why you need to take a step back and stop.

Think about it

We've all been conditioned to fear the word “worthless.” We equate our value with the long list of to-dos we've checked off, the goals we've smashed, and how "useful" we are to the machine of society. It's like we're all vying for the title of Most Productive Cog in the Machine.

But take a moment to consider this: Are you happy, or just busy? When was the last time you did something that had no purpose beyond your own joy? If your productivity disappeared tomorrow, who would you be? Are your basic human needs being met beyond survival? Are you fulfilling your need for belonging, for love, for self-esteem? Or are you sacrificing these in the name of being 'useful'? Are you climbing Maslow's pyramid, or are you just running in circles at the bottom, chasing the illusion of being needed? These questions might sting, but they’re worth asking. If you feel an uneasy twinge right now, it’s probably because deep down, you know that somewhere along the way, you lost yourself to the chase.

Let go of default usefulness 

There’s an approach that feels so counterintuitive, it might even be disturbing at first. Imagine stepping away from everything you've been told about success and purpose. Imagine embracing an idea so radically different from your current worldview that it makes you uncomfortable—because that discomfort is exactly where change starts. What if the best thing you could do for yourself, and ultimately for society, is to let go of this relentless need to prove your worth through constant productivity?

That guy you don't know from "Her"

That's Alan Watts and he had an interesting take on this—something about stepping away from the pressure of being a cog in the great productivity machine. You know, the guy who was so good at making sense of life's contradictions that he was even the AI that Scarlett Johansson ran away with in the movie Her. Watts believed that freedom and true purpose only emerge when we let go of the need to constantly justify our existence through action.

Watts used to talk about the idea of being “useless” as a way to truly discover freedom and purpose. Sounds weird, right? But here’s the catch: Eastern philosophy got kind of a raw deal when it got translated to us Westerners. Somewhere along the line, the meditative art of embracing nothingness turned into a commercialized self-help industry about "calming down just enough to continue being useful." And that’s not it, not even close. We’ve missed the point. The real secret—the one they don’t want you to hear—is that being useless is exactly what leads to the deepest kind of utility.

Chairman of the Bored

Imagine, for a moment, a chair. Not a flashy ergonomic productivity throne—just a simple chair, sitting in the corner, not doing a damn thing. For most of its day, it’s useless. It’s not actively holding anyone up, it’s not stressed out about whether it’s contributing to your success, and it sure as hell isn’t planning on becoming an office superstar. Yet, when you need to sit, it’s there, stable as ever, ready to serve its purpose. Now imagine you, desperately trying to be a multi-functional office chair-slash-gaming-station-slash-standing-desk hybrid. Exhausting, right?

My point is...

In our quest to be constantly, ceaselessly useful, we’ve become useless to ourselves. We’ve neglected the core human need to simply be. To be okay with idleness, with purposelessness, with floating for a little while. We devote all our energy to keeping the machine running until we don’t even remember why we started. And when the gears inevitably seize up, we spiral—lost, defeated, burnt out. This is what happens when you let utility be your master instead of your tool.

When was the last time you went for a walk? Really, just a walk with no goal, no running to the store on your way to work, the gym. Just a walk for the sake of walking, for the sake of feeling the ground beneath your feet and the air in your lungs? When was the last time you danced around the house just because? Or played, goofed around without a care in the world—no agenda, no outcome, no 'usefulness' in sight? Just you, moving, laughing, being present in the moment for the sheer joy of it?

Here’s where the magic lies

If you dare to be useless, really useless, you start reclaiming parts of yourself that you’d buried in all that hustle. You start to see that you are valuable, even when you’re not doing something that serves a greater economic purpose. And funny enough—unexpectedly, controversially—this is when the pieces start to fall into place. You find clarity, and suddenly, your contributions become richer, more genuine, even more “useful” than before. But this time, the utility isn’t forced. It isn’t mined out of you until there’s nothing left. It’s born out of genuine presence and joy.

It’s a contradiction, I know.

But that’s the nature of life—messy, contradictory, and full of the kind of irony that makes you laugh in the middle of the night when it hits you. To really live a life of meaning, to be truly valuable, you have to let go of all the ways society has taught you to measure your worth. The real trick is to be useless, to do things that bring you joy with no regard for how they fit into the grand scheme of productivity—and, lo and behold, you end up more useful than you ever imagined.

Let go

Embrace the contradiction. Be useless. Then watch as your life, once spiraling out of control, finds a direction and purpose you never saw coming. It’s time to start being useful to the most important person in your life—you.