The Usefulness of Useless
The “usefulness of useless” might be exactly what the future needs.
The 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to metal–organic frameworks (MOFs).
One gram of MOFs can have the surface area of a sports field! That means they can store huge quantities of gas or vapour inside a small physical volume. Or catalyze reactions using a fraction of the material. The potential impact is practical and immense: climate mitigation, clean water, safer storage, etc.
But, it’s how we got here that captured my attention.
It illuminates a critical paradox we live with:
The most practical discoveries begin as impractical questions.
In 1974, a spark of intuition during a classroom experiment led one scientist to chase a hunch. Ten years later, we had the first proof that MOFs worked.
But they emerged with no obvious application, so there was little funding for them. In the last 50 years, resources have been increasingly directed toward “practical outcomes” with the intent of creating products of “immediate value”.
(A natural consequence of living in a borrowed world is the more debt you have, the shorter your time horizon. But, that’s a discussion for another day.)
It took another 15 years for two scientists to demonstrate breakthroughs that had ‘obvious practical impact with immediate value’, like sucking clean water out of the desert air or storing greenhouse gases on demand.
We have seen this pattern before: radios and lasers, quantum mechanics and DNA, GPS and CRISPR. All major technologies unlocked by curiosity and patronage, long before commercial applications emerged for funding.
It’s the freedom to explore without expectation that yields discoveries which change everything.
I spent a decade on a quest to understand the source of consciousness. Most people didn’t understand. I sometimes didn’t either. But the curiosity persisted. And it bore fruit.
There’s a meaningful personal lesson I learnt, which mirrors the scientific one:
Follow the curiosities in your life that seem impractical today, because they often hold the key to a breakthrough transformation in your life tomorrow.
Hermione’s enchanted handbag from Harry Potter comes to mind. From the outside, it looked small and trivial - just another accessory. Inside, it contained worlds.
That’s what following true curiosity is like. A small, “useless” question that turns out to hold an entire future folded within it.
The outcome may not be clear from where you sit today. And that’s ok.
The unknown is the womb that births the answers to your deepest questions.
Care for it. Like you would care for a child.