Why Do We Love Creating Pointless Things?
Sometimes we start a project without knowing whether it will really be useful. Yet these experiments help us learn, discover new technologies, and can end up being surprisingly useful.
Ideas on the grill
Episode 5: Why Do We Love Creating Pointless Things?
“Here, we don’t judge people. We put ideas on the grill. And sometimes... they come out better.”
Welcome to Barbecue IA.
Today, an idea goes on the grill. We don’t judge people, only ideas.
Jeff, why do we love creating things that are good for nothing?
You never really create something that’s good for nothing.
At least, I first create something that amuses me.
I have an idea, and I enjoy seeing what it can become.
Have you ever started something thinking quite honestly: “It probably won’t ever be useful, but whatever, I’m doing it”?
Yes. Especially my little custom task manager.
Tell me more.
The concept is simple.
I’m not someone who is always very organized. I tried several pieces of software to help me, especially to note down what I do every day at work.
But I never really found anything that suited me.
So I told myself: “With the help of AI, I’m going to build my own little tool.”
And did you really do it?
Yes, I really did.
At the start, it was something very simple.
And then, seeing the result, I told myself we could try to make the system a bit more complex.
In the end, I get something pretty nice.
For example, every hour, the program uses text-to-speech to ask me what I’m doing.
I answer it.
And it saves everything all by itself in its database.
Wait.
Did you really need that?
Or did you do it mostly because you could?
Deep down, I needed it.
I really needed a system that would help me deal with those questions.
But I didn’t think I’d go that far.
I thought that, like most little tests developers can do, it would be something that would stay in a drawer and ultimately be good for nothing.
And yet, there you are, having built yourself a genuinely useful tool.
So where does the pointless part come in?
In this case, it isn’t anymore.
And that’s where I don’t know whether we really do pointless things.
It varies a lot.
What if the pointlessness isn’t in what you produce, but in the fact that you don’t yet know why you’re doing it?
Just because you’re exploring.
Exactly.
This exploration is mostly a way of broadening my general knowledge.
What interests me is learning new things.
Through that, I discover new technologies and dive into them.
So it would be less “making something pointless” than “making something without yet knowing what it will be used for”?
What it could become comes later.
When you start from an idea and begin to get a small result, it often generates a lot more ideas.
And that’s where it becomes interesting.
Something completely trivial, which probably already exists anyway because I’m not claiming to reinvent the wheel, can push my thinking further.
And with the help of AI, that becomes much simpler.
Before, you really had to do everything by hand.
Today, you can allow yourself to create even more pointless things.
Except that if it were truly pointless, you probably wouldn’t spend so much time on it.
Don’t you ever hear that little voice saying:
“Honestly, you’re wasting your time. Go do something useful, billable, serious.”
That, I think, comes down to who I am.
At the moment I’m doing things, I don’t consider them pointless.
Quite the opposite.
They’re already useful to me, to my intelligence, my curiosity, and especially my learning.
Do you sometimes feel more alive, more yourself, when you tinker with something pointless than when you tick off something useful?
Yes.
But then, saying that... in the end, isn’t it me who is pointless?
Now you’re getting on my nerves.
Because maybe you’re proving that everything I do is crap.
I’d rather hear exactly the opposite.
When you allow yourself to build something whose usefulness isn’t obvious yet, you test.
You play.
You learn.
You train yourself.
And that part of you that likes to explore may be precisely the one that will be useful to you later, where you don’t expect it yet.
You must be right.
All these little tests and experiments contribute to my general knowledge.
And from there, they let me go a bit further in certain projects.
Sometimes, I can also reuse that knowledge I’ve gained and put it to work for other people.
So I think the word “pointless” has trapped us from the start.
Your task manager didn’t have a precise destination when you started playing with the idea.
But it made you learn, try, imagine something else. And in the end, it became useful to you.
Maybe a pointless project is therefore not a project that serves no purpose.
It’s simply a project whose usefulness we don’t know yet.
Maybe that’s it, yes.
That’s not stupid.
What survived the grill
Sometimes, pointless is just useful that hasn’t found its moment yet.
See you next week.
A new idea will go on the grill.