The Utility of the Useless
There is a tree in the writings of Zhuangzi: a gnarled, twisted thing that the woodcutters passed over without a second glance. Its timber was too crooked to build with, its branches too irregular for beams. Useless, they said, and walked on. And so the tree grew old. It spread shade. It outlived the straight-grained trees that had been deemed so valuable, the ones that were taken down in their prime because they were exactly what the market needed.
Zhuangzi’s point was not subtle: “All men know the use of the useful, but nobody knows the use of the useless.”
I think about that tree often. Not as a curiosity from ancient Chinese philosophy, but as a diagnosis. Because somewhere between Zhuangzi’s mountain and our present moment, we made a decision: not all at once, and not in a single room, but incrementally, across generations, that the standard for a human life would be the standard of timber. Straight. Efficient. Measurable. Yielding something the market could use.
In 1911, a mechanical engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor published a slim monograph that would become, by some accounts, the most influential management text of the twentieth century. The Principles of Scientific Management opened with a problem that had been nagging at Taylor for years: human inefficiency. Not the inefficiency of machines, which could be studied and corrected, but the inefficiency of workers: the tendency, as he called it, to “soldier,” to work at a leisurely pace, to withhold their full output. Taylor’s solution was elegant in its ambition: apply the methods of science to the management of human labor. Break every task into its smallest components. Time each motion with a stopwatch. Eliminate the wasted movement. Replace the worker’s judgment (“the rule of thumb”) with the manager’s science.
What Taylor proposed for the factory floor was a fundamental reorganization of what a person was for. The individual worker’s rhythm, intuition, and embodied knowledge were liabilities. The system was what mattered. As he put it plainly:
“In the past, the man has been first; in the future, the system must be first.”
He believed this was for everyone’s benefit. Maximum productivity meant maximum prosperity, and who could argue with that? Taylor was not a cruel man. He genuinely thought he was liberating workers from drudgery by replacing it with optimized motion. But the legacy he left was something more insidious than he intended: a template for understanding human worth itself.
Taylor’s logic didn’t stay in the factory. It migrated. It settled into schools, hospitals, universities: wherever humans gathered to do things together. And then, quietly, it migrated into the self.
By the time I was old enough to understand what “productive” meant, it was already a virtue. Not just a description of output, but a measure of moral standing. To be busy was to be serious. To rest was to be lazy. To wander, to daydream, to sit with no agenda: these were embarrassments at best, character failures at worst. We didn’t inherit this from ancient tradition or from careful reflection on human nature. We inherited it from the stopwatch.
I notice this in myself most clearly, not in my work but in my pauses. There is a particular quality of unease I feel when I am doing nothing that can be accounted for: sitting by the stream behind our building, watching water move over rock, not thinking about anything in particular. Some part of me is always conducting a small internal audit: What is this for? What does this produce? Shouldnʻt this time for reflection be used to develop some new theory, hypothesis, or research inquiry? The questions are so automatic I barely notice that they are the pervasive voice of an ideology that challenges my very sense of self-worth. It is the voice of the manager who got inside over years of socialization in a neoliberal capitalist, individualistic society.
And the terrible irony is that this internal messaging, this relentless self-optimization, doesn’t actually produce the vitality or virtue it promises. It produces exhaustion dressed up as ambition. It produces people who are always performing their usefulness and are never quite sure whether they exist when no one is measuring them.
This is where Zhuangzi’s tree becomes something more than a metaphor. The tree did not survive by being more efficient than the other trees. It survived by being, in the eyes of the woodcutters, worthless. Its uselessness was its protection. And in the space that uselessness opened: the space where it was not being converted into lumber or profit, it did what living things do when left alone. It grew. It sheltered. It continued.
There is something in this that speaks directly to what this blog is trying to name: a myth of independence; the fictional narrative that we can live without one another. It is also the fiction that our worth is produced: that it is the output of our effort, the sum of our useful acts, the total of what the world can extract from us. Taylor gave that fiction its modern grammar, but the roots run deeper, and the damage extends beyond factory efficiency. It reaches into the most private rooms of our inner lives: into the way we rest (or cannot), the way we love (or cannot), the way we grieve (or cannot), because none of those things produce anything you can measure.
The stream behind my building moves without a plan. The water doesn’t organize itself for maximum efficiency. It finds the line of least resistance and moves along it, and in that movement, it carves something: slowly, over time, that no stopwatch could have designed. I am learning, imperfectly, to take instruction from that.
I want to be clear: I am not writing this from a place of having figured it out!
This is something I struggle with every day. The permission to stop. The belief: still shaky, still under construction: that rest is not a reward you earn after you’ve done enough, but a condition of being alive well. I have not arrived at ease with downtime; I am in active negotiation with it.
The negotiation looks like this: a colleague reaches out about a new project. The work is interesting, the people are good, and somewhere in my chest, there is the old familiar pull. What if this is the thing that matters? What if I miss something important by not being there? That fear is not about the project. That fear is about worth. It is the internalized stopwatch asking whether I’m producing enough to justify my existence. And so I say yes when the honest answer, the self-protective answer, the relationally responsible answer would be: maybe in a few months.
I have noticed, and my marriage has been the clearest mirror for this, that when I protect time for rest, something softens. Conversations go longer. There is more to give. The work I do return to is sharper, more alive; not because I’ve been strategically recharging like a battery optimized for output, but because I’ve been human. The tradeoff, and I will name it plainly, is that I get less done. Fewer projects, fewer outputs, fewer items checked off. By the logic of productivity culture, this is failure. By the logic of every relationship I care about, it is the opposite.
I see the same negotiation playing out in my students. These are undergraduates in the thick of emerging adulthood, at the exact developmental stage Erikson and Arnett both point to, when the primary psychological work is building intimacy. Learning how to be close, how to trust, how to belong to something beyond yourself. And instead of being supported in that work, they are being inducted into busyness. The schedules are impossible. The pressure is cumulative. The culture is one of constant output, constant visibility, and constant proof of effort. And they feel the shift happening. My students tell me they are worried about losing a sense of work-life balance, yet feel required to let the imbalance become their new normal.
Then, only those who can sustain that pace are granted access to the club; the others quietly disappear from the spaces where resources flow. This is sometimes called “finding your passion.” But it functions more like hazing: a system that filters by endurance rather than by flourishing, and calls the result merit.
What it overlooks is something Darwin actually said, rather than the version of Darwin that productivity culture prefers. The phrase most often attributed to him, “survival of the fittest,” was not Darwin’s own, and it did not describe individual supremacy. What Darwin described, across hundreds of pages of patient observation, was the survival of the most cooperative; the organisms that developed mutualistic relationships, that shared resources, that regulated together. The “fittest” in evolutionary terms were not the most independent. They were the most relationally capable.
Which means the most generous thing we can sometimes offer one another: as colleagues, as teachers, as friends, is not an invitation to produce something together. It is an invitation to rest together. Not let’s build this but, let’s stop for a while, and I’ll stop with you. Not productivity as a shared project, but restoration as a shared practice. This is what caring for someone’s wellbeing can look like when we take it seriously: asking them not what they can contribute, but whether they are okay; whether they have had enough quiet; whether there is space, in the life they are living, for the things that cannot be measured.
The tree, after all, did not survive by being more useful. It survived by being left alone long enough to become itself.
