Benefits of Academic Research
The reason we do lots of strange and probably useless research is that predicting which bits will turn out to be important is only possible in retrospect.

Consider, for example, the internet on which we are discussing the apparent uselessness of research. It is now driving a significant fraction on the world economy. Twenty years ago, it was just starting to be publicly noticed. Twenty years before that, my company was playing with the prototype versions in experiments you likely would see as largely useless and known only to a small niche audience. Thirty years before that, in 1945, Vannevar Bush laid the basic principles of hyperlinked text, in what was clearly an ivory tower fantasy... and yet here we are.

Almost everything ever done in science is useless... But the parts that aren't make a real difference. Sometimes only a little, sometimes a lot, and sometimes they shift the fate of civilizations. You just have to hold a vision of how it might matter, and chase that dream with all your heart.