The Useless Utility of Jewelry

What is the use of jewelry?
It cannot fill your stomach.
It cannot cure illnesses.
It cannot improve work efficiency.
Nor can it solve most of life's problems.
If we measure things solely by "utility,"
it seems that jewelry had no reason to exist in the first place.

Yet, humanity has never ceased creating jewelry.
More than five thousand years ago,
the Mesopotamians wore gold upon their bodies.
Ancient Egyptians brought jewelry into their tombs,
hoping for life to transcend death.
The Ancient Greeks carved myths into adornments,
hoping that courage, wisdom, and love would accompany them.
The Ancient Romans used jewelry to express status and glory.
To this day, people still exchange jewelry as gifts
at weddings, birthdays, and anniversaries.
If jewelry were truly useless,
why would it have accompanied human civilization for thousands of years?

Later, I realized that perhaps we were asking the wrong question.
Jewelry is certainly not as important as bread.
Not as important as water.
Not as important as medicine.
One must first survive.
Only by surviving,
can there be civilization,
can there be art,
and can there be jewelry.
But humans do not live for survival alone.
When we are well-fed and secure,
we begin to gaze at the stars.
We begin to sing.
We begin to paint.
We begin to write poetry.
And we also begin to craft gold, gemstones, and jade
into wearable works of art.

At that moment, the question we ask is no longer:
How to survive?
But rather:
How to live.

Today, we are increasingly accustomed to asking:
What is its function?
How much time can it save?
How much efficiency can it improve?
This line of thinking is not wrong.
It is precisely because technology solves these problems
that it constantly drives society forward.

Yet, many of the truly important things 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.
Yet it is precisely these things
that make life rich.

Jewelry is no different.
It will not do your work for you.
It will not change the world.
But many years later,
when you open that jewelry box again,
it will bring back a person’s smile,
a promise,
a long-forgotten moment,
right before your eyes.
What it records
is never the gold or gemstones themselves,
but how we once loved,
how we made our choices,
and how we lived through a certain moment in our lives.

Zhuangzi said:
The utility of the useless is the greatest utility of all.
Perhaps, jewelry is precisely this kind of existence.
It does not solve the problems of survival,
but it responds to the questions of life.
And natural gemstones,
having formed over hundreds of millions of years,
simply exist in silence.
When we gaze upon them,
perhaps we are reminded
that life does not always have to be a rush.
It will not make decisions for you,
nor will it eliminate all your anxieties,
but it can remind you to
pause.
Return to the present moment.
Return to yourself.
Perhaps, this is the utility of jewelry's uselessness.

P&S, let natural gemstones accompany you back to inner peace.