The Useless Use of Jewelry
What is jewelry for?
It cannot feed you.
It cannot cure illness.
It cannot make you more productive.
It solves almost none of life's real problems.
If we measure everything by “usefulness,”
jewelry, from the very beginning, had no reason to exist.
And yet, humankind has never stopped making it.
Five thousand years ago,
the Mesopotamians wore gold and gilded ornaments on their bodies.
The Egyptians carried jewelry into their tombs,
hoping life could outlast death.
The Greeks carved myths into ornaments,
hoping courage, wisdom, and love would stay close.
The Romans wore jewelry to declare identity and honor.
Even today, at weddings, birthdays, anniversaries,
we still give jewelry as gifts.
If jewelry truly has no use,
why has it followed human civilization for thousands of years?
Later, I began to think we had been asking the wrong question.
Of course jewelry is not as important as bread.
Not as important as water.
Not as important as medicine.
A person must survive first.
Only once we are alive
do we have civilization,
do we have art,
do we have jewelry.
But people don't live merely to survive.
Once warmth and safety are met,
we begin to look up at the stars.
We begin to sing.
We begin to paint.
We begin to write poems.
And we begin to take gold, gemstones, and jade,
and shape them into things we can wear.
At that moment, the question people were really asking was no longer:
how do I keep going?
But rather:
how do I live?
Today, we've grown used to asking:
What does it do?
How much time does it save?
How much more efficient does it make me?
There is nothing wrong with this way of thinking.
It is precisely because technology solves these problems
that society keeps moving forward.
But so many things that truly matter in life
cannot be defined by function.
Music has no function.
Literature has no function.
A sunset has no function.
An embrace has no function.
And yet it is exactly these things
that make life rich.
Jewelry is the same.
It will not do your work for you.
It will not change the world.
But years from now,
when you open that jewelry box again,
it will bring back a person's smile,
a promise once made,
a moment long since passed.
What it holds
was never the gold or the gemstone itself,
but who we once loved,
what we once chose,
and how we once walked through a certain moment of our lives.
Zhuangzi once wrote:
the use of the useless is the greatest use.
Perhaps jewelry exists exactly this way.
It doesn't solve the problems of survival,
but it answers the questions of living.
A natural gemstone,
formed over hundreds of millions of years,
simply exists, quietly, where it is.
When we gaze at it,
we might remember
that life doesn't always have to rush.
It won't make decisions for you,
and it won't erase your worries,
but it can remind you
to pause.
To return to this moment.
To return to yourself.
Perhaps that is the useless use of jewelry.
P&S — let natural gemstones bring you back to a quiet mind.