Do Something Useless with Your Life

Or, God Plays Chess

Not many know that some years ago, I was a chess fanatic. Chess to this day is the only sport that I’ve followed carefully; listened to live coverage, regularly checked standings, and replayed notable games. I played soccer for several years as a child and young adult and loved it. But I never followed soccer the way I do chess. I have followed football (American) when the arc of a team caught my interest (the rise of the Chiefs and the fall of the Pats being the most recent). I very much enjoy watching pro-level volleyball but I don’t follow it at all. I couldn’t name one volleyball player. Sometimes I watch golf highlights, but only when John Daly is playing.

Not many know that I’m into chess because I stopped following, playing, or even thinking about chess for four or so years. During the COVID lockdowns, I, like much of the rest of the world, had more time on my hands. I kept my job, but as a facilities manager for a college, no college means my job was slow. I — again like a sizable chunk of the world it turns out — got into chess. I played chess a lot in high school, not well, but a lot. Eventually I was decent enough to beat some of my older colleagues. After high school, I all but dropped it. I played a game here or there, but never enough to continue improving. Chess stayed with me even so, I had chess books from high school that have moved with me throughout the years. I would check in on high level players every so often. Magnus Carlsen became world champion in November 2013 by defeating Vishy Anand (I thought Anand was unbeatable). I was nineteen at the time, just four years younger than Magnus. Every so often I thought about investing time in the royal game again. I never did until about two months ago.

I dropped chess (again) in early 2021. Things were opening back up, I was back in full swing, and I was experiencing an odd crisis. I needed a hobby. I’ve always been a workaholic—I don’t really know what to do when I stop working and so other more self-destructive habits threaten. I knew I needed something to do in the spare time that I should have if I wasn’t working constantly. I was (as I thought at the time) very practical about this. I wanted a hobby that could be a side hustle and make some money. Naturally, I considered chess and thought whimsically about trying for a title and making it big on the tournament circuit. Of course, that was too rosy and I dismissed it quickly. Here I made a serious mistake and I suspect you might be making it too. I thought since I couldn’t do it perfectly, I shouldn’t do it at all.

Top level chess players have to be remarkably talented and lucky, or so I thought. It turns out I don’t really know what “talented” means—though lucky they certainly are. Typically you are considered too old to be a top-level player if you didn’t start playing before the age of ten. Magnus’ father taught him to play at age five. I didn’t learn how to play until sometime between fifteen and sixteen. You have to have some independent means to hire coaches, travel to tournaments, etc. You also have to think that this is what you want to spend your life doing—or again so I thought. I elected not to become a grandmaster and chess took on a bitter flavor for me because there was something I truly loved about the game, but I felt I had to devote my life to something else. I couldn’t let it tempt me, so it had to be put away. That something else turned out to be woodworking and after a painful four years, I actually know something about woodworking! Of course I’ve made very little money doing it.

This isn’t where I say I’ve decided to no longer be a woodworker and become a chess grandmaster. That would still be as foolish a thing to hang my hat on now as it was then; more foolish because I’m now married to a beautiful woman and father to a handsome little boy. This is where I say that I was wrong in how I thought about chess. I thought I had to be consumed by it, make it my life’s work, make money doing it. Instead I think I’ve learned a simple truth; living is the work. By that rather koan-esque statement, I mean that what we do professionally has little to do with what we become vocationally. It is my vocation to be a father, a husband, to pursue eudaemonia and—what’s more—become absorbed in happiness, to be beatified.

This is not to say you shouldn’t have skills. I have said elsewhere that I hate the term hobby and I hate hobbyists. A hobby is a waste of time, a hobby is a dilatory, effeminate, weak activity not befitting adults. Building skills, cultivating within yourself an art, a techne, a know-how, is part of what it means to become fully human and partially divine. For that you do need to devote yourself for thousands of hours, risk arthritis, stitches, and mania. That’s what craft demands. Rightfully so, because by participating in an ordered making, we participate in the creative work of a God. It shouldn’t be easy. This is also not to say it should be practical. I’ll close my homily with this; I dismissed chess because it’s just a game. But, my friends, that’s all that any of this is. The work is you and I and what we become. So long as chess, or checkers, or underwater basket weaving stays in proportion to the work, never overshadowing or otherwise dominating our lives, enjoy a game or two! Become a little obsessed! You are still participate in the fullest flourishing of yourself. Some skills are more useful and they might take precedence for the time being, but someday Sunday comes and with it time for leisure and you should take it. Do something useless for once.