Every morning I’m up before dawn, enjoying some coffee on my front porch, and thanking my Maker for another day – I’ve reached the age where that gratitude is heartfelt. Two or three times a day, I play a couple of games of solitaire. Often, I’ll read a few pages from some book I know well. Once or twice a week, I’ll pick up the phone and call my good friend John to grouse about politics and the news. On Sundays, I hand-write a letter to two of my grandchildren, then do the same for two more of the kids the following weekend.

These activities might be classified as “useless things,” author John Howting writes in his essay, “G.K. Chesterton & the Useless Things.” Following Chesterton’s lead, who tongue-in-cheek defined as “useless” those things done for their own sake, Howting builds an excellent case for pursuing those “useless things” which are desirable in and off themselves. “Chesterton would put it this way: We partake in useful activity, so that we may have time and place for useless activity,” Howting says.

The automated holiday cards which some people now send, especially at Christmas and New Year’s, are examples of this useful but negative utilitarianism, Howting writes, ending his essay this way:

I propose that we write our own letters and sign our own cards during this Christmas season. Can we do that? I think we can. You don’t have to do it on parchment with a quill—although that would be cool. You can use a pen and paper; and then, you can send it to your loved one. Or you can hand-deliver it to them.

If you do that, you will have done a beautifully useless thing. And that is how this starts. Because, in our struggle for freedom, it is the useless things that are most useful.

I sincerely hope this essay has been useless.

That word “useless” is a bit confusing, but if I’m interpreting things correctly, it works this way. The time has come to put your three-year-old to bed, which means a fairy tale is in order. You search YouTube for “Jack and the Beanstalk read aloud,” and find you have several choices, allowing your laptop to tell the story to your daughter while you finish the dishes or surf your phone.

That’s the utilitarian approach.

Suppose you instead select a treasury of fairy tales from the bookshelf, snuggle on the bed beside your daughter, and read the story aloud. Given the two choices, this is what Chesterton might define as useless in our automated, digital age, yet here we can see why the “useless things” are most useful. From such acts love grows and flourishes.

Consequently, it strikes me that the useless things are first and foremost those things on which we lavish our affection, which can include work. Obligation may also enter into this definition. Once, a few years after my wife’s death, my then 13-year-old asked why we were spiffing up the kitchen. “It’s just going to get dirty again,” he said, clearly indicating that he considered our cleanup a waste of time. But of course, we make this effort not just to eradicate the bits of debris on the floor or coffee spills on the counter, but because of the pleasure derived from a kitchen that sparkles.

Howting provides several examples of the negative side of utilitarianism, of our culture’s movement away from the human and toward automation and more recently, toward a digital world. Rather than creating their own amusements as people once did, making their own music and telling their own stories, we’ve grown dependent for our entertainment on stories and songs performed by others. More pertinent to our times is the way many people show more interest in their phones and screens than in flesh-and-blood human beings, preferring to watch videos of cats on YouTube rather than listening to Uncle Frank tell them about growing up in Mississippi during the Reagan years.

Other actions that fall under Chesterton’s idea of “useless” might include offering a kind word to a harassed barista, holding the door open at the library for a mom with a baby in her arms, listening to a troubled friend, or helping that retiree next door shovel snow from the driveway. In the public square such acts of common decency and common sense are always in short supply but would surely make Chesterton’s list of “useless things.” As for our private lives, the useless things are those people, objects, and activities that provide us with a feeling of quiet joy.

At the top of the list we might place gratitude, our appreciation for all those seemingly useless things whatever they may be, including the gift of life and the privilege of inhabiting this beautiful, swirling planet. “Gratitude,” Chesterton once wrote, “is happiness doubled by wonder.” Indulge in that sense of wonder, another unnecessary ingredient in the utilitarian essentials of survival, and we discover a mother lode of the useless.

As our society inevitably becomes ever more the captive of technology, let’s fight for our humanity by embracing and practicing the useless things.

And yes, I, too, hope you find my words here useless.

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image Credit: Freerange