Social insurance was not just pointless; it was counterproductive. Wrestling called the match "pointless and senseless". People use deflection in a conversation in order to render a conversation pointless and insignificant. It seemed a perfectly pointless cruelty to me. Thus it came to pass that pointless or interminable activities are sometimes described as "Sisyphean". Fu found that practicing just for the sake of practicing to be a pointless endeavor. Parker later stated that the MPAA's concerns led to "a wasteful, pointless and expensive exercise". He portrayed them as leading essentially pointless lives in spite of great wealth and advantages. This knowledge isn't very meaningful to many of the students, who see it as pointless. They have formed two factions which appear to portray the excesses of pointless intellectual debate. He sees the whole exercise as pointless. Gottlieb considered Toole talented but felt his comic novel was essentially pointless. That would be a pointless exercise for me. The phrase itself means a pointless pursuit. Jillette came out between songs telling long and intentionally pointless stories.