I like dadaism. I like it because it is an art movement that brings the absurdity of the world to the front in a transgressive manner. It is punk from the 1910s. Punk is boy band dadaism.
We as humans want to believe that our lives have meaning. They don't. As meaning machines, we can't handle this fundamental truth. We have created religions, ideologies, and philosophies trying to handle what is the meaning of our meaninglessness.
One beautiful example is how some Buddhist monks spend hours creating elaborate sand paintings. Once they are done, they sweep them away.
I engage in many versions of sand painting. One of them is studying chess.
Studying chess is perhaps one of the most useless ways to fill your time. It produces no commercial value. Unlike studying sciences, whose knowledge we can apply in other fields, studying chess gives you knowledge that only apply to chess. Most of us who study chess will say that this isn't true, that we learn strategy and thinking ahead, but this is sophistry to justify how we spend time engaged in a useless hobby, in the practical, making money sense of the word.
We study chess because we love it. We love it because it is beautiful. It brings our cognitive abilities to its limits. We get rewarded for our studying when we win; we are humbled when we lose. In a chaotic, meaningless world, chess gives us order.
When we gain something from chess, it is always a side effect of our pure love for it. When something we learn is useful, that is accidental. Most positives skills we learn could have been learned with some other activity, like learning physics, a musical instrument, a physical sport. We pick chess because we love it.
Faced with a meaningless life in a chaotic, random world, we can decide what matters. Learning chess out of love means that we choose beauty; we choose love. I can't think of anything more dada than that.