To only do the things that are useful and profitable inevitably takes us to dead-ends where humans end up behaving like little more than animals in the jungle, the law of the strongest, living for the next meal and reproduction, surviving and that's it. Most of it can be seen as finite games in the sense of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games .

But culture can be on another level. It's an investment in the possibility that we can progressively do better than mere animals - that we can realize our human potential. That's why culture exists, it's a difficult and hardly profitable work in progress for our improvement as a species.