30 Useless Facts That Will Just Take Up Space In Your Head, Unless You’re A Random Trivia Fanatic

We loved reading through all the answers that the question of this thread brought out, and so we wanted to learn what the original inspiration that ignited this discussion was. To do that, Bored Panda reached out to LoneVentriloquistSFW, who loved our interest and was glad to answer our questions. 

The OP shared that he decided to ask this question minutes after learning that E is the most used letter in the alphabet, which he also shared in the comments of his thread. “It just sparked my interest in knowing a ton of useless information from people,” said the author, adding that he didn’t find any other use for it yet.

The success of his post caught the OP by surprise. “To be honest, I didn’t expect my post to blow up like that,” said the poster, talking about how this was probably the highest interaction he has ever gotten from Reddit. “It felt awesome. It felt like I was a celebrity for a moment *lol*.”

There is a certain type of knowledge that we define as useless. But when you stop and think about it, no kind of information is ever truly and completely without any use, is it?

While you may not be able to practically apply some of the knowledge you come in contact with, and if you’re forced to learn it anyway, it might feel like a waste of precious time, as Brian Tomasik wrote in his blog, there are many other ways in which it can be valuable.

And we don’t look as deep to find that value. Learning in itself is a fun thing that can bring a lot of enjoyment. For example, you can learn by reading books or watching films, and while the stuff you come across there will rarely find practical application in your life, few would argue that it’s not entertaining. Plus, any kind of learning can come with some unexpected discoveries, as it can often be difficult to predict just what kind of information you’re lacking or what thing you don’t know you might like.

At the same time, learning new things plays a big role in shaping your worldview. Our brains change with every experience. While we might forget a lot of the stuff that we learn, we retain the wisdom we gain from it. Moreover, it also improves our intuition and pattern-recognition abilities, as well as our general understanding of how the world functions.

Acquiring new information and skills also works as an intellectual exercise that can be compared to a professional athlete going to the gym. Even if the stuff you’re learning doesn’t seem to matter at the moment, it can help you get into a habit of learning and prepare you for when you need to learn something actually important.

Johnny Briones of Medium further expands on this subject, writing about how memory techniques that can help to recall and retain information are best learned using so-called useless information.

Memory techniques sound and are quite wonderful. However, the problem is that people sometimes don’t realize that these, too, have to be learned first and you can’t just jump right in, learning everything that you want with ease. 

Running into problems at first is expected, and when you do, you’ll likely spend more time looking for solutions than actually learning what you set out to learn. This can be frustrating and make it seem like the techniques you’re using are not working.

However, if you first practice these methods using useless information, you won’t feel the pressure if you can’t remember something that doesn’t really matter to you. Thus, you will be able to easily identify problems you run into and find ways to solve them.

In conclusion, we can confidently say that while not all information is equally important, no information is ever truly useless, even if it may seem that way at first glance. So read up because you never know when some random fact you encounter in Reddit threads like these might prove to be a lot more valuable than you thought.

What did you think of these facts? Do you have anything you’d like to add? Share your thoughts in the comments below!