Is Chess Good?

This is a contrarian post, read at your own risk! I believe chess is fun, for those that enjoy solving puzzles, as I do. It is also beneficial as a mental exercise, perhaps, although many other activities qualify as mental exercises. Is chess useful? I have to say no, decidedly not, it is a useless "waste of time," on par with playing video games or watching television. For that reason, I would not advise any young person to "get serious" about the game or harbor any notion of becoming a professional chessplayer or, for that matter, pursuing the game very closely. It is a bit of a loss when someone rises to the highest ranks in chess, and then one compares them to say, a world-class physicist or biologist, and the loss to society is clear. Even at my level, perhaps I would have been better off studying computer programming instead, and society, too, would have been better off. But I feel like it is too late to change course, and at any rate don't want to, I love chess too much to quit. But to a young Magnus Carlsen or the like coming up, I would steer them away from chess, point them towards the sciences instead, where there is such great need. Perhaps we should be thankful that computers have surpassed human beings in chess capability, because that has removed much of the prestige from the game. Anyone that can afford inexpensive computer and software can experience grandmaster-level play, anytime. That certainly steals the thunder from the human player, although the fun remains.