What uselessness actually protects
This character comes from a different voice. For most of this library the words have been Lao Tzu's, spare and aphoristic. 無用 belongs to Zhuangzi, the other founding figure of Taoism, who argued in strange, funny stories about carpenters and butterflies rather than in maxims.
His most famous is about a tree. A carpenter passes an enormous old oak and does not even stop. Bad wood, he says. It would rot as a boat, split as a vessel, sour as a beam. Worthless. And that, Zhuangzi points out, is precisely why it has been standing for two hundred years. Every straight tree in that forest was felled for being good at something.
無用 (Wúyòng) means no use, and Zhuangzi means it literally rather than as consolation. Usefulness attracts the axe. The cinnamon tree is cut because it can be eaten. The lacquer tree is slashed because its sap is wanted. Being valuable to someone is not a neutral condition, it is an exposure, and the crooked trunk that no tool can work is the only thing in the clearing that gets to grow old.
A note for anyone who remembers 樸, the uncarved block. These are close cousins and not the same point. 樸 is wood that has not been shaped yet, which is potential. 無用 is wood that cannot be shaped at all, which is unsuitability. One is before. The other is never.
Where Zhuangzi tells it
The cost of being useful
We are taught to make ourselves useful, and to keep proving it. Skills that pay, hobbies that could become side businesses, rest justified as recovery for more output. Value gets defined as what you can be used for, and a person begins to audit themselves the way a carpenter audits timber.
The cost is that being good at something is a claim other people can make on you. Whatever you are most useful for is where the demands concentrate, which is why capable people are so often the most depleted ones in the room. Nothing has gone wrong when this happens. It is the straight trunk being selected, exactly as Zhuangzi describes.
無用 is not an argument for being incompetent, and Zhuangzi is not recommending you fail on purpose. It is an argument for keeping part of your life outside the economy of usefulness. The pursuit that will never be monetized, the skill with no application, the hours that produce nothing anyone can name. Those are not the leftovers of a life. In this reading they are the part that survives the harvest.
Spend an hour this week on something with no use at all. Not rest that makes you productive later, not a hobby you might monetize. Something you would struggle to justify to anyone. Notice how strong the urge is to give it a reason, and do not give it one.