Beyond Usefulness: Remembering the Sacred in a World Obsessed with Utility

There’s a whisper I keep hearing lately—beneath the noise of achievement, productivity, and progress—a whisper that asks: What if the value of something wasn’t in what it could do, but in what it simply is?

We live in a world that relentlessly reduces everything—knowledge, beauty, even relationships—to utility. We are taught, explicitly and implicitly, to ask: What is it for? What can I get from it? Can it be monetized? Scaled? Sold? And if the answer is no, it quietly slips beneath the surface of our awareness, deemed irrelevant or wasteful.

Even in my own recent discoveries—wisdom from ancient systems, sacred ways of being, powerful new insights—the moment they land in me, I can feel the near-instant pull to do something with them. To turn them into a course, a post, a product, a tool. As if knowing on its own isn’t enough. As if I’m not enough unless I’m producing.

The Origins of the Trap

This objectification—the collapse of value into function—is not accidental. It has deep roots.

From the Industrial Revolution to modern capitalism, from Enlightenment rationality to colonial expansion, we've slowly learned to see the world as raw material. Land became “real estate,” trees became “timber,” rivers became “resources,” and people became “human capital.” Everything is catalogued by how it can serve an economy, a machine, a system.

Foucault speaks to this in his exploration of epistemes—deep, unconscious structures of thought that shape what counts as knowledge in any given era. In the modern episteme, knowledge itself has become a tool, an input for innovation and profit. We are no longer just seekers of truth; we are consumers and producers of content. And in this episteme, progress becomes the altar we all worship at, whether we mean to or not.

The Cost of Utility

But there is a cost to this way of seeing. When we reduce everything to use, we lose the ability to recognize essence. Beauty becomes marketing. Love becomes transactional. Spiritual insight becomes intellectual property. We stop relating to the world and start managing it.

And worst of all? We begin to treat ourselves the same way. Our worth becomes tied to output. Our bodies to how they look. Our minds to how well they perform. Our lives to what they can produce.

What does this mean for the mother whose care work is never paid? The artist whose creations never sell? The healer whose medicine isn’t “evidence-based”? What does this say about the wisdom of the land, of the elders, of children at play, of those whose lives exist beyond metrics and margins?

A World Beyond Utility

But what if… what if value was intrinsic?

What if your breath alone was enough to be worthy of reverence? What if a poem that no one ever reads still mattered? What if the tree that bears no fruit still held the memory of a thousand seasons and deserved to stand tall for that alone?

There is a world beyond usefulness. One where we don’t ask what something is for, but we meet it in its being. A world where rivers are ancestors. Where knowledge is sacred, not strategic. Where presence is more powerful than productivity.

This world isn’t gone—it’s just forgotten. It lives in the songs of our ancestors, in the laughter of our children, in the breath we sometimes remember to take deeply. It’s the world that existed before the obsession with more, better, different. It’s the world that still exists in the gaps, the silences, the slowness we’re taught to avoid.

The Return

The path out of the trap of utility is not forward—it’s inward. It’s a return.

A return to wonder. To reverence. To relationship. To the knowing we carry deep inside that there is more to life than what can be bought or sold. A remembering that we are not machines or markets. We are miracles.

Let us pause long enough to meet the world not for what it can give us, but for what it is.

Let us remember that to be is enough.