This YouTuber Explained Why She Only Makes ‘Useless Things’ (And Why You Should, Too)

Simone Giertz rose to fame on YouTube for a particularly strange reason. She’s not particularly like other vloggers, who talk about their lives on camera or record particularly crazy stunts for the public. Instead, Giertz is known for her robotic inventions, particularly because most of them are, well, useless. Ridiculously so.

Her robots include a “wake up machine” that’s quite a bit more violent than an alarm clock, a “breakfast machine” that made a mess much better than it made a meal, and a “p*ssy grabs back machine” that, while utterly unusable, was a pretty interesting response to Donald’s Trump’s controversial comments.

What’s the point of creating machines that are useless? Some may argue that it’s all for the views, but Giertz has another argument: failure changed the way she thought about the world.

Giertz, who once suffered from performance anxiety to the point where she was utterly afraid to fail, found out that you could never truly fail if you were trying to fail. She explained in her TED Talk that while she never studied engineering, creating these bizarre machines allowed her to practice mechanics without worrying about performance anxiety, because she wasn’t trying to create something great, she was just trying to create something. It was her enthusiasm for creation — and her ability to share that enthusiasm with her followers — that truly mattered.

“There’s a true beauty of making useless things because it’s this acknowledgement that you don’t always knows what the best answer is,” Giertz said. “And it turns off that voice in your head that tells you that you know exactly how the world works.”

While it may seems counterintuitive to create meaningless things, Giertz has a point. So many people spent so much time focusing on the finish line that they forget to enjoy the journey. Sometimes the most enjoyable part of creation is spent at the drawing board — and sometimes in the process of making something useless, you’ll stumble upon ideas you never would have thought of in the first place.