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You can’t put Gregorian chant on your resume. Knowing the difference between Doric and Ionic columns won’t get you promoted. Being able to name all the moons of Jupiter doesn’t increase your earning potential. Yet people spend enormous amounts of time acquiring exactly this kind of knowledge.
Why?
The economist Thorstein Veblen had an answer, and it wasn’t flattering. In his view, we love useless knowledge for the same reason peacocks love useless tail feathers. It’s a display. A costly signal that says, “I have so much time and resources that I can afford to waste them on things that don’t matter.”
This idea should bother us. We like to think our intellectual pursuits are noble. Pure. Above such base concerns as status and showing off. But Veblen suggests that when we spend Sunday afternoons reading Proust or learning about medieval history, we might be doing something closer to buying a luxury watch than we’d care to admit.
The Leisure Class Gets an Education
Veblen wrote about this in the late 1800s, watching how America’s new rich spent their money. He noticed something odd. The wealthier people became, the more they seemed to value things that served no practical purpose. Ornate furniture you couldn’t sit on comfortably. Elaborate dinner rituals that made eating more difficult. And most tellingly, education in subjects that had nothing to do with making a living.
The children of wealthy families studied Latin and Greek. They learned about art history and philosophy. They could discuss poetry and recognize musical compositions. None of this helped them run a business or manage an estate. That was precisely the point.
By learning useless things, they proved they belonged to a class that didn’t need to worry about usefulness. Workers learned trades. The middle class learned professions. But the truly wealthy? They could afford to learn nothing practical at all.
This pattern hasn’t disappeared. It has just gotten more subtle.
Today’s version of the leisure class might work 80-hour weeks in finance or tech. They claim to value productivity above all else. Yet these same people compete to get their children into schools that teach ancient philosophy and literary criticism. They spend their precious vacation time visiting museums and archaeological sites. They listen to podcasts about physics and take online courses in subjects completely unrelated to their jobs.
The form has changed. The function remains the same.
The Paradox of Practical Uselessness
Here’s where it gets interesting. The knowledge we call useless often turns out to be remarkably useful, just not in ways that show up on a balance sheet.
A friend who works in tech once told me that his philosophy degree has been more valuable than his coding bootcamp. Not because philosophy directly helps him write better code. But because it taught him how to think about problems from multiple angles. How to spot assumptions. How to argue without getting emotional. These skills matter in ways that are hard to measure but easy to see.
The same applies to most “useless” knowledge. Studying history doesn’t teach you how to predict the future, but it might help you recognize patterns in human behavior. Reading novels doesn’t make you a better negotiator on paper, but it might give you insight into how people think. Learning about art doesn’t increase your productivity, except that it might help you see connections others miss.
This creates a strange loop. Knowledge is valuable precisely because it appears valueless. If everyone could see the direct utility of studying Renaissance poetry, it would become vocational training. It would lose its status value. The uselessness is the point.
Companies claim they want practical skills. Then they hire people who studied impractical subjects at prestigious universities. They say they care about what you can do. Then they judge you by what you know about things that have nothing to do with the job.
We’re all caught in this game, whether we admit it or not.
Trivia as Social Currency
Walk into any group of educated people and mention a random fact about Mongolian history or quantum mechanics. Watch what happens. Someone will respond with their own obscure knowledge. Then someone else will join in. Before long, you have a competition masquerading as conversation.
This is Veblen’s theory in miniature. Each piece of trivia is a tiny peacock tail. “I know about this obscure thing” translates to “I have enough leisure and education to accumulate random knowledge.” The more obscure the better. Anyone can know popular facts. True status comes from knowing things that took effort to learn and serve no purpose.
Pub trivia nights are essentially status competitions with beer. Dinner party conversations are intellectual displays. Even casual chat has an element of knowledge oneself positioning. We’re constantly, subtly signaling our place in various hierarchies through what we know and how we talk about it.
The internet has made this worse and better simultaneously. Worse because now everyone can Google anything, making genuine expertise harder to signal. Better because the internet has created new categories of useless knowledge to master. Obscure memes. Niche subcultures. Deep lore about fictional universes. The status game adapts to whatever medium it finds.
The Useful Idiots of Useless Knowledge
Not everyone who pursues useless knowledge is playing a status game. Some people genuinely love learning for its own sake. They study ancient languages because they find them beautiful. They memorize bird species because it brings them joy. They read dense philosophy because it makes them think.
These people exist. They might even be the majority. But their genuine love of learning provides cover for everyone else’s status seeking. It makes the whole system work.
If only cynical social climbers studied classics, the status value would collapse. The fact that some people do it for pure reasons maintains the prestige. Their authenticity subsidizes everyone else’s pretension.
This doesn’t make the pure learners foolish. But it does mean they’re participating in a system larger than their personal motivations. Your Latin teacher who loves Virgil for the poetry isn’t thinking about status. The parent who pays for that Latin class definitely is.
Knowledge vs. Credentials
We should distinguish between knowing useless things and having credentials that prove you know useless things. They’re related but different.
A degree in philosophy signals that you spent years studying something impractical. It suggests you come from a background where you could afford such choices. Even if you forgot everything you learned, the credential remains valuable.
This is why people get anxious about degree inflation. When bachelor’s degrees become common, you need a master’s. When master’s degrees become common, you need a PhD. Not because jobs actually require more knowledge. But because the credential is a status marker, and status markers only work if they’re relatively scarce.
The knowledge itself might be genuinely useful. The credential is definitely useful. But they’re useful in different ways and for different reasons.
Someone who self-educates in philosophy might gain all the benefits of philosophical thinking. But they won’t get the status benefits of having studied it officially. The system rewards the signal more than the substance.
The Productivity Paradox
Modern culture sends mixed messages about useless knowledge. On one hand, we worship productivity and practical skills. Learn to code. Start a side hustle. Optimize everything. Time is money and money is the measure of value.
On the other hand, we still revere people who know impractical things. We watch documentaries about obscure topics. We respect public intellectuals who write books that few people finish. We send our children to liberal arts colleges that explicitly teach things divorced from career preparation.
This isn’t really a paradox. It’s two status games running simultaneously.
The productivity game lets you signal conscientiousness and ambition. Look at how efficiently I use my time. See how focused I am on results. Notice my hustle.
The useless knowledge game lets you signal something else. Refinement. Depth. The kind of security that doesn’t need to constantly optimize for income. I can afford to spend time on things that don’t pay.
Smart people play both games. They work intensely but read widely. They optimize their careers but cultivate obscure interests. They respect the bottom line but also know their wine regions.
This exhausts everyone but it maintains the hierarchy.
When Useless Becomes Useful
The strangest thing about useless knowledge is how often it becomes useful in unexpected ways.
Steve Jobs famously credited a calligraphy class with inspiring Apple’s focus on typography. A completely impractical interest that shaped one of the most valuable companies ever created. But this happens all the time at smaller scales.
Someone’s hobby knowledge of Roman engineering helps them think about modern infrastructure problems. A musician’s understanding of harmony influences their approach to project management. A historian’s perspective on past pandemics informs their response to current ones.
You can’t plan these connections. They emerge organically from having a mind full of apparently unrelated information. This is possibly the best argument for useless knowledge. It creates the conditions for original thinking.
But here’s the uncomfortable part. This utility is often retrospective. We notice when useless knowledge turned out to be useful. We don’t notice the vast majority of useless knowledge that remains useless forever.
Most of what you know about 17th century Dutch painting will never help you in any measurable way. That doesn’t make it worthless. But it does mean we should be honest about why we value it.
The Democracy of Obscurity
The internet has democratized access to useless knowledge. You don’t need to attend expensive universities to learn about philosophy or art history anymore. Everything is available for free to anyone with curiosity and an internet connection.
This should eliminate the status value, right? If anyone can learn anything, knowledge can’t signal privilege.
Except it hasn’t worked out that way. Instead, the status game has shifted to curation. Not what you can access, but what you choose to learn. Your particular combination of obscure interests. The depth of your knowledge in niche areas. How you synthesize information across domains.
The new status marker is having interesting intellectual taste. Knowing about the right obscure things. Being able to reference the right books, podcasts, and ideas. Following the right thinkers before they become mainstream.
In some ways this is more meritocratic. In other ways it’s just a new barrier for people to navigate.
Living With the Contradiction
So what do we do with this? Should we stop pursuing useless knowledge because it might be a status game? Should we feel guilty about enjoying things that don’t produce measurable value?
Probably not.
The fact that something serves a social function doesn’t make it illegitimate. Language is a status marker and we still need to communicate. Fashion signals group membership and we still need to wear clothes. Knowledge can be both genuinely enriching and socially useful as a signal.
The trick is being honest about the mixed motives. Yes, you might love learning about ancient Rome for its own sake. But also, it’s nice to be the person at dinner who knows interesting historical facts. Both can be true.
Yes, your impractical degree might have taught you valuable thinking skills. But also, it signals you’re from a background where such choices were possible. Both matter.
The problem isn’t pursuing useless knowledge. The problem is pretending it’s purely noble when it often serves our self-interest. The problem is creating systems where access to impractical education determines life outcomes. The problem is confusing genuine curiosity with social climbing, or worse, letting social climbing masquerade as genuine curiosity.
Despite all the status games and social signaling, useless knowledge does have genuine value. It makes life richer. More interesting. More connected. A mind full of random facts and ideas is simply more fun to live inside than a mind optimized purely for productivity.
It creates unexpected possibilities. It makes you a better conversationalist. A more interesting person. Someone who can engage with diverse topics and see unexpected angles. It might even make you better at your job, though probably not in ways you can put on a performance review.
So by all means, learn useless things. Memorize poetry. Study dead languages. Master obscure trivia. Just don’t pretend you’re doing it purely for noble reasons. Don’t look down on people who choose practical knowledge instead. And don’t confuse knowing things with being wise.
Veblen might say we’re all just peacocks displaying our tails. Maybe so. But some of us are peacocks who also happen to know a lot about Byzantine architecture, and there’s something beautiful about that, even if it doesn’t pay.
