The Useless and the Useful

Laozi uses the example of a great tree, too gnarled to be useful for lumber, surviving while straight perfect trees are cut down. Our productivity-obsessed culture measures worth by usefulness: what you produce, earn, and contribute. This framework collapses at death. A corpse is entirely useless. And yet, before we're dead, this obsession with usefulness has already killed us—it has made us instrumental rather than present, productive rather than alive. Memento mori challenges this inversion. Remembering that you will die and be useless asks: what am I doing that matters precisely because it is useless? Time with a child. A conversation. Sitting in silence. A moment of beauty. These are 'useless' by market logic but rich with meaning precisely because they serve no external purpose. Laozi teaches that wu wei—effortless action—emerges when we stop trying to be useful and instead simply respond authentically to what is. Mortality strips away the demand to be useful and returns us to the freedom of simply being.