The Beauty of Useless Things
What happens when you make things just to throw them away, and why that might be the most honest art of all
Uselessness is Overrated.
Most days, I make things I immediately throw out, sitting at my desk with a pair of scissors and a stack of old newspapers that smell like damp basement storage and forgotten mornings, the thin pages smudging under my fingertips as I cut them up without precision, my hands moving faster than my thoughts, collaging images and headlines that have no business being together but somehow look right when I press them against each other, the glue sticky between my fingers, catching lint and cat hair and tiny paper scraps that will be embedded there for hours. I color over whole sections with markers that bleed through to my desktop, the chemical smell mixing with coffee beside me, and I write words I don't remember thinking in handwriting that looks almost like a stranger's, my wrist cramping slightly from pressing too hard. I always tighten up my shoulder when I’m focused. I’m reminded to r e l a x. Then I crumple it all up, feeling the satisfying resistance of the paper against my palms, and toss it in the bin where it lands with a soft thud among yesterday's attempts.
Not because it's bad. Because it did its job. It helped me feel something move through my body like electricity following a path from my brain down my arms through my fingertips and out into the world where I could finally look at it outside myself instead of letting it circle endlessly in my head getting louder and more distorted with each rotation.
That's the whole point, the release I feel in my shoulders when something formless becomes form, even if that form is messy and incomprehensible to anyone but me in that moment.
I think we talk too much, filling silence with explanation and useless meanings and words that inflate but never quite capture the thing we're actually trying to say. I think we expect language to do everything — explain us, fix us, prove we exist — when really some feelings don't want to be translated into neat sentences with proper punctuation and logical progression. They want to be processed through your hands, through your body, through ink bleeding into paper and glue drying in uneven patches and rhythm that comes from scissors cutting in quick succession. Through mess that expands across your desk and floor, through the physical sensation of destroying and creating simultaneously, through the quiet focus that drowns out everything else until you look up and realize the light outside has changed.
Everyone's obsessed with meaning, with purpose, with justification. What does it mean? What's it for? What are you going to do with it? As if creation always needs a destination, as if the journey from nothing to something isn't enough by itself, as if everything needs to be explained and categorized and labeled to be worthwhile.
And I don't know. Sometimes nothing. Sometimes I just needed to hold scissors and destroy something quietly while the world kept going, while my thoughts settled like dust after being stirred up, while my hands remembered how to make instead of just type and scroll and tap. Sometimes the making is the meaning and trying to explain beyond that feels like translating a dream — the more precisely you try to capture it, the more it slips away from what it actually was.
There's a kind of bravery in making something useless, in spending time and energy and focus on something with no purpose beyond its own creation. In creating without proof or audience or feedback or validation. In not trying to be good or impressive or marketable or even comprehensible to anyone else. In letting it be weird and ugly and unfinished and not worth sharing on any platform anywhere. In deciding that the act of making is enough, that the connection between brain and hand and material is complete in itself without needing to connect further to likes or comments or sales or validation.
Even my job is like this, though no one would guess it from the polished final products. I iterate constantly, one idea after another flowing through my hands and onto screens and paper, drawing it, building it, naming it, tweaking it, tossing it, the floor around my desk a graveyard of almost-was ideas that died so the final one could live. Most of it never sees the light beyond my lamp, and weirdly, I love that part the most, the freedom of knowing these attempts aren't being judged, that they can be as wild or boring or derivative or strange as they need to be to get me to the next version.
It amazes me — how infinite it is, this process of chasing the right form, the right words, the right design. The revising, the rethinking, the starting over completely at god knows what hour because something feels off but you can't name it. There's always another version waiting, another way in through a different angle, another approach hiding just behind the one that didn't work. You never really arrive at perfect, at finished, at "this is exactly what I meant to say and exactly how I meant to say it." And that's what keeps me going, what makes me reach for the scissors again the next day and the next.
That's what makes it addictive, this endless reaching, this perpetual almost-there that never quite resolves but somehow feels complete in its incompleteness.
Because something in me gets fed every time I make something that's allowed to disappear, every time I engage in the ritual of creation without the pressure of permanence. My body knows what it needs — to process through motion, through material, through making — and fights against the idea that everything needs to last, to be preserved, to be justified by its longevity or impact.
People misunderstand artists, thinking we're performing even in our private moments, thinking we create for an imagined audience even when alone in rooms at odd hours. They think we want attention, recognition, a final product that proves our time was well spent, our existence meaningful. But really, most of us just want to feel that moment when something comes through our hands that didn't exist before, that second when the thing in your head takes physical form and you recognize it even though you've never seen it before. That flicker of yes — this — before it's gone again and you're chasing the next one.
It's kind of like loving someone you know you'll lose, the way your body commits fully despite your brain knowing the end is built into the beginning. You do it anyway, immersing yourself in the temporary, in the knowledge that permanence isn't what makes something real. Because it's real while it lasts, while your hands are moving, while the glue is drying, while you're fully present in the making before the thinking takes over again.
Honestly? I don't live for results. I live for that feeling in my chest when something clicks into place, for the slight breathlessness that comes with recognition, for the way time bends around focused creation until hours feel like minutes. I live for the motion of making, not what gets made. Clarity.