The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge
Or why following your curiosity down strange rabbit holes might be the most productive thing you do all week.
Let’s get one thing straight: the world doesn’t give a damn about your inner life.
It wants output. Deliverables. Results. You’re supposed to monetize your hobbies, hack your workflow, track your steps, sleep, calories, and dreams. Be a good cog. Spin faster.
But once in a while—between deadlines and dopamine hits—you feel it. That strange gravitational pull. A weird Wikipedia entry. A half-heard lyric. A vintage ad for jet-age toasters. Useless, all of it. And irresistible.
And maybe—just maybe—that’s the good stuff.
Back in 1939, Abraham Flexner, a guy who helped overhaul medical education in the U.S., wrote an essay for Harper’s with a title so defiantly unsexy it looped around to genius: The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge.
“Institutions of learning should be devoted to the cultivation of curiosity... The mere fact that useless work invariably turns out to be useful is of no practical value to the men and women engaged in it at the moment.”
Translation? Stop trying to reverse-engineer your life into a TED Talk. Chase the weird for no other reason than it stirs something in your gut.
Einstein didn’t sit down to boost Q4. He got obsessed with light. The DNA guys weren’t angling for a startup—they were curious.
Curiosity, my friends, is the original sin of progress.
And speaking of holy sinners, Rick Rubin—equal parts sage, wizard, and barefoot chaos agent—recently dropped a meditation on distraction that stopped me cold:
“Instead of resisting distractions, what if you allowed yourself to follow them?... not to force a breakthrough... but to see where they lead.”
You know what that sounds like? Permission. To wander. To drift. To click on that weird link. To dig into Mongolian throat singing, or early Soviet animation, or some other fever dream of a side quest that seems to make no damn sense at all.
Until it does.
Because sometimes what you need isn’t more focus. It’s a jolt. A swerve. A chance to shake the snow globe of your brain and see what weird flakes fall into place.
Rubin calls it “purposeful distraction.”
“We engage with distractions of genuine interest… cultivating a mindful approach to distraction, we may discover new sources of inspiration and problem-solving in unexpected places.”
I call it living. Giving a damn about the strange, the unproductive, the beautifully irrelevant. That’s where the texture is. That’s where the soul is.
So here’s the plan: This week, let yourself veer. Follow a hunch. Read something useless. Watch a video that has nothing to do with your goals. Ask a stupid question. Call it research if you must.
But do it for the spark. Not the spreadsheet.
And if nothing comes of it?
So what.
You fed the part of yourself that still believes in mystery. That alone is worth something.