251. An Impractical Life

Our lives are dominated by practical concerns. We make choices based on the likelihood that they will cause our material situation to improve. We optimize ourselves around variables we can measure, maximizing the quantities we value and minimizing those we do not. We look for practical reasons when we need to justify our decisions to ourselves and others.

We do these things because they are prudent and they help us move closer to our desired goals. We measure our successes and failures in units of practical value that we call wealth or status or fame. We want our lives to include all of the things we want and none of things we hate. We sometimes even see everything in terms of its practical value, to the point that we see value itself as having a practical foundation.

To instead seek out what is impractical might seem almost quaint, as though it were for someone else — a different person living in a very different world. Sometimes we sense that there might be more to our lives than the practical, but this idea gets pushed out by the chorus of voices telling us to focus always on what’s practical.

A consequence of this is that it can sound like madness to insist there are moments when we must completely ignore the practical. Yet it is precisely by going beyond the realm of the practical that we become capable of discovering another kind of value, a value that does not depend on this or that, a value that cannot be quantified because it is immeasurable.

We sometimes catch glimpses of this impractical value. We see it in the artworks that move us, in the beauty of the natural world that takes our breath away, in the friends and family members that we appreciate and love. Even so, we find ourselves doubting its worth. We feel we cannot trust it because we cannot explain it. We cannot find a way to rationally justify it within the structure of our practical world.

The result is that we fail to give this other kind of value the consideration it warrants. We never fully consider the possibility of an impractical life, a life focused not on instrumental goals and material concerns, but on impractical acts of giving, compassion, and love.