I am a physicist, and I would say that, perhaps, you don't understand why we "waste" money on high energy physics. It's very similar to the reason why rich people buy useless status symbols, when they could instead buy useful things. It's essentially telling everyone, "I am so rich I don't care about money anymore and can afford to waste some of it on this useless thing".

In science, we as a society throw money at something like high energy physics, because we are telling ourselves, "We love knowledge so much, that we will throw it at high energy physics, which has little economic benefit to us" [1].

In other words, you can't prove that you love knowledge for its own sake, if you only invest in fields which have economic benefits. You have to invest in fields with no benefit, to prove to ourselves that we still care. That has deep and lasting philosophical impact on society.

[1] If you read grand funding agencies internal documents, you will learn that the primary economic benefit of fields like high energy physics is training people on hard problems, who will then go and apply those skills and raise the bar in other fields.