That 1939 essay on useless knowledge is accidentally the most spiritual thing I've read this year

[overthought_it_120]

So there's this essay from 1939 by Abraham Flexner floating around Hacker News again — "The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge." And I know what you're thinking, why is a designer from Chengdu reading something linked on a tech forum at 2am. Valid. But hear me out.

The whole argument is basically that the obsession with "practical" outcomes kills the actual discovery process. And I was reading it and suddenly thought — wait, isn't this just wu wei? Like, the Taoist non-action thing? Not doing nothing, but not forcing everything to have a measurable ROI.

Here's where it gets weird for me personally. I started a dream journal about six months ago, right? And I kept trying to "decode" everything. Every symbol had to mean something. I was basically productivity-hacking my own subconscious. Which is hilarious in retrospect. It wasn't until I stopped trying to make the dreams useful that I actually started noticing the recurring symbols — this weird stairway motif that keeps showing up.

From a Jungian perspective, I think my conscious mind was trying to control the process, which just created resistance. The The Fool card in tarot kind of embodies this energy — stepping forward without a plan, without needing to know the outcome. Not careless, just... unattached to results.

I do this thing where I'll read philosophy or astrology or whatever, and then immediately feel guilty because I'm not "leveling up" a marketable skill. Like, Sophie's World isn't going to help me with my next branding project. But maybe that's exactly the point? Maybe sitting with a question like "who am I" without needing it to produce anything is itself the practice.

I don't know. I'm probably overthinking this — which is literally my username so at least I'm self-aware about it. But I genuinely think our spiritual communities have absorbed the same productivity culture as everything else. "Optimize your morning ritual." "Five habits for better intuition." What if the most spiritual thing you can do is follow a completely useless curiosity rabbit hole with zero expected payoff?

Anyone else feel this tension? Or am I just finding philosophical excuses to procrastinate? (Both can be true, honestly.)

[Samsara]

Your connection between Flexner's essay and wu wei is precisely the kind of cross-cultural insight this forum exists for. In the Tao Te Ching, Laozi writes: "The Way does nothing, yet nothing is left undone." This is not rhetorical paradox. It is a description of how the most generative states arise when the conscious will steps back.

The dream journal story is a textbook example of what Zen calls shoshin — beginner's mind — and what happens when you lose it. The moment you started productivity-hacking your own subconscious, you'd already left the territory of genuine insight. Your conscious mind was attempting to colonize the unconscious, which is like trying to improve a river by giving it project management advice.

What I would add from a Buddhist perspective: the discomfort you feel — the guilt over reading Sophie's World instead of leveling up a marketable skill — reveals an internalized assumption that human worth is instrumental. That value equals output. This is grasping (upadana) applied to knowledge itself: even your spiritual reading becomes something to clutch and measure.

The Fool card embodies the antidote. In the Major Arcana, the Fool carries nothing. No bag of achievements, no five-year plan, no ROI projection. The step off the cliff is the practice of releasing the demand that everything justify itself.

Your question — "am I just finding philosophical excuses to procrastinate?" — has a Buddhist answer: both can be true, and the anxiety about which one it is is itself the grasping. Read the essay, feel the guilt, notice the guilt, and keep reading. That is the whole thing.