Useless Space

20 Nov 2025 - Hugo O’Connor

In Zhuangzi’s parable, a carpenter passes an ancient oak. Make boats and they’d sink. Make coffins and they’d rot. Make vessels and they’d break at once. The tree’s uselessness preserves it. Productive trees get torn apart as soon as their fruit ripens; this gnarled giant stands untouched, massive and old.

That night the tree comes to him in dreams: “Their big limbs are broken off, their little limbs are yanked around. Those useful trees live in constant abuse. I’ve been trying for the longest time to be of no use.” The dreaming carpenter wakes to find the tree still standing.

We’ve stripped our spaces and time down to their productive use. Calendars carefully blocked. Every interaction tracked, measured, searchable. The useful trees line up in rows. Their limbs are yanked around.

Third spaces persist through apparent uselessness. The coffee machine where no agenda governs conversation. The margin between meetings. The walk that takes the long way around. You cannot metric spontaneous insight. You cannot dashboard overhearing something that connects to a problem you didn’t know you had. The moments we most value emerge from time we cannot justify.

Jung called them synchronicities: meaningful coincidences that arise in margins.

Kurt Vonnegut walked to buy envelopes. He could have ordered them in bulk. He walked instead. The newsstand. The vendor. The post office. The clerk he flirted with. “We are here on Earth to fart around,” he said, “and don’t let anybody tell you any different.” The envelopes justified the journey. The journey held the value.

What survives when we’ve pruned away everything that cannot demonstrate its value?

The carpenter wakes. The tree still stands.

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