Beautifully Useless

When you hear the word useless, how does it land on you? It hits me like a brick, heavy and blunt. It's the last thing you would want someone to say about you if you grew up in a rural Midwest town. People in those places plant stout work ethics in their kids and have little patience for those who don't know how to work. With this as my backdrop, it's no wonder Jaclyn S. Parrish caught my ear when she declared game developers are useless.

Her words weren't a condemnation, however, but a compliment. She meant it in the best possible sense! She explained, "Useless professions include things like artists, musicians, poets, writers, and dancers—people who don't make things that help us survive. They make surviving worth it!" She went on to say, "Useless professions produce things whose worth cannot be expressed in monetary terms. What we, as game developers, create has liberal arts value, not just servile arts value."

I don't want to delve too deeply into Jaclyn's talk; it's fantastic, and I would rather have you watch it. Instead, I want to connect this idea of useless professions like game development with another idea occupying my mind: the abundance of God.

Earlier this month, I reconnected with a friend I had lost touch with for over ten years. He now works for The Bible Project, and as a byproduct of our conversation, I've been binging their podcast. Fortuitously, they had just re-released their series on generosity, which explores this theme of abundance and God's extravagant generosity.

Listening to this series made me realize that the very existence of game developers and other useless professions is a testament to a world of abundance created by a generous creator. Practically speaking, they can only exist where abundance is present. They are luxuries, not necessities, for our survival.

These beautiful, useless professions fly in the face of what the world tells us: things like good things are scarce, so you need to fight for them, and you're only as valuable as what you produce. And the creations from these professions feed our souls, delight our spirits, and proclaim truth, beauty, and goodness. All the while, they point to the abundance—dare say excess—that exists in our world and the infinite God who created it. He is a God who created countless universes that man may never know or see, and He filled our world with so many different living creatures that we may not complete the job of naming them.

So, embrace the beautifully useless and thank the Lord they exist!