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Some things have no purpose. They contribute nothing of substance, they are explicitly a waste of time, and the opportunity cost of doing these things is massive. This is (often) intentional, and their lack of purpose is their purpose.
The most well-known implementation of this is the feathers of the peacock: they do not increase the fitness of the peacock, but that’s the point. Spending enormous energy on something that gives nothing in return is a difficult-to-fake signal of wealth. If peacock feathers were easy to produce, they would fail to be useful. This idea is not unique to the peacock, and many seemingly-pointless things are actually peacock feathers in disguise.
The lawyer in jeans and the engineer in slacks
Lawyers wearing suits is an example: wearing a suit does not increase their knowledge of the law, but it is a difficult-to-fake signal of their wealth (which they hope people will assume comes from their prowess in practising the law).
Naïvely we might assume every field would have this same incentive structure, and so every field would have it’s members sporting luxury watches and designer jackets. But not every field shows this behaviour. Software developers do not wear suits. This hints at the existence of a spectrum: on the one end, if everyone in your industry is spending energy on bespoke suits and luxury watches, not doing so will signal a lack of fitness, motivating you to fit in. On the other end, if everyone in your industry wears jeans and a hoodie to work then not doing so is probably not an effective means of signalling your prowess. Note that being the odd one out is negative on both sides of the spectrum: The causally dressed lawyer is considered lazy, and the suited software developer is considered flamboyant.
Even if a field shuns explicit signalling, being able to communicate your prowess is invaluable, and so will appear in other ways. In software development this is typically a long and varied GitHub profile. In academia this is typically a long list of citations and published papers.
It appears that fields where it’s easy to publicly advertise your prowess (via open source code or published papers) encourage the devotion of any additional energy into this advertising. But fields where it’s difficult to publicly advertise prowess (like law, since most contracts are not public and there’s no “GitHub for law”) tend to encourage pouring any additional energy into difficult-to-fake signals such as suits and watches.
Wasteful objects convey meaning: “I am wealthy or powerful enough to waste wealth or power on this object”. But it has a second implication: I have wealth to waste, but my field also doesn’t have anything better to spend this wealth on. If peacocks had more significant natural predators, evolution would tend to favour stronger muscles or better ability to fly over the long tail feathers.
This explanation has predictive power: If a rational lawyers could spend more money to improve their skill at practising law, they’d prefer to do and would make do with a less fancy suit. At first glance, this appears borne out by the high cost of prestigious law schools and the number of lawyers who apply to go there. Conversely, if software development did not have difficult-to-fake signals such as public code repositories, we’d expect there to be more showmanship and more emphasis placed on appearances. Over time, sharing your code has become easier, and the software developer’s “uniform” has slowly lost the requirement to wear a tie or a button up suit. This seems weak evidence in favour.
A happily rotting Monet
I worked on super yachts in the Mediterranean for two years after high school, and of the many things that surprised me, one was how the extremely wealthy decorate their homes / yachts. You probably expect that everything would be luxurious and expensive, and you’d be correct, but there’s something beyond that. The “problem” faced by the ultra-wealthy attempting to signal their wealth, is that purchasing designer furniture is just a once off cost, no matter how expensive. It is a great signal that you were wealthy at the time of purchase, but doesn’t do much to signal your wealth over time. To signal continuous wealth, many of these yachts are decorated with materials which explicitly degrade in the salt air. These materials are used because they require constant maintenance to upkeep. Seeing these materials indicates not only that the owner could afford the initial price tag, but that they employ someone to keep it in pristine condition, and then they replace it every year when it degrades too far.
An example of this is the storage of priceless paintings on a yacht. The salt air is unbelievably bad for them, but that’s the point. These items exist to slowly degrade over time as proof of the owner’s power.
Many seemingly stupid decisions made by the ultra-wealthy can be explained by this lens. Yachts themselves are outrageously expensive to keep in good condition, and this is by design. An easy-to-maintain yacht has a completely different target market, typically for those wealthy enough to buy a yacht but poor enough that they have to maintain the yacht themselves.
Zero value is better than negative value
Beyond the ultra-wealthy, items without purpose can be useful signals of resources not being used to further your opponent’s goals. In the disarmament agreements between the USA and USSR, war planes and bombers were dramatically cut into pieces and left in open fields for the opponents satellites to take footage of.
Sometimes, large companies will poach employees from competitors or outright buy startups that might compete with them, but then do nothing with the startup’s product or allow the poached employee to work on nothing in particular. The purpose behind these moves is purposelessness. It doesn’t matter that the employee is doing nothing productive, it just matters that they’re not doing something productive for a competitor. This also happens with patents at large companies.
The worth of a wonky pot
Sometimes, purposeless things can still be beneficial to the creator or owner, it’s just that the benefit is derived from the process of creating the thing, but not from the finished product. The work of a student practising a craft is the most clear example of this. The purpose of a thousand wonky pots to the pottery student isn’t in the pots themselves, but derived during the process of creating the pots.
Meandering paperwork
There is a phrase load-bearing friction, I believe popularised by Patrick
Mackenzie (patio11 on the Internet), used to describe processes which are
painful, but their purpose is to be painful. For example, a gym might make
cancelling your subscription incredibly tedious, this is intentional. The
friction you need to work through as you cancel your subscription serves the
purpose of reducing the number of people who unsubscribe. Up until now this
essay has discussed objects that are without purpose, but systems or
processes can also be (seemingly) without purpose.
(some conclusion will go here, possibly more examples)