A building can begin as an arrangement of lines before anyone knows the address. A website can begin as a page someone wants to look at. An object can be made because its proportions are bothering the maker. This kind of work makes practical people nervous, including me.
“The work is to stay near the things that make you curious.”
Destination is not the only form of usefulness. Attention is useful. Pleasure is useful. The experience of finding a sentence or shape that makes the world feel briefly more exact is not a business plan, but it is not nothing.
The danger is confusing polish with meaning. A beautiful thing can still be empty. The work has to survive beyond its surface, even if what it does is small: hold a body, alter a room, make a question harder to dismiss. I do not know where everything I make will go. I know I want it to have a chance of being worth the trip.