THE SIMPLE JOY OF DOING SOMETHING COMPLETELY PURPOSELESS on purpose

There is a particular feeling that arrives with the first genuinely warm Saturday of year.The window is open, the light has changed and something in the air smells faintly of possibility. And within minutes, sometimes seconds, the mental list begins. The garden needs sorting. You could finally start that thing you've been putting off since January. You could go for a run, or reorganise the kitchen.

- KELLIE GILLESPIE-WRIGHT

The year, which felt perfectly manageable in February, suddenly develops a will of its own. There is catching up to do, there is ground to make up. “The longer days and brighter mornings energise us and make us start to think about what we could do differently,” says Dr Emma Hepburn, clinical psychologist, NHS practitioner and author of The Anti-Burnout Book (Greenfinch, £20). That instinct is real, and it's not wrong. But it has a shadow side. And it might be worth examining what we gain when we choose to ignore it.

The usefulness trap

We have become, without quite noticing, extraordinarily good at justifying how we spend time. Hobbies have become side hustles, walks have become step counts, reading has become self-development, even rest has acquired a vocabulary of optimisation: hygiene, recovery protocols, restorative practices. Leisure, in other words, has been colonised by usefulness.

Dr Giulia Poerio, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Sussex, whose research explores mind-wandering, has spent years studying what the mind does when we finally leave it alone. And she thinks our preoccupation with usefulness has its dangers. “I think we lose the value of activities being intrinsically motivating and rewarding,” she says, “and potentially lose appreciation of the cognitive and emotional benefits of the activities in and of themselves.”

It’s not just that things become less enjoyable. We lose access to something harder to manufacture; something that no productivity metric can measure. “Of course there are benefits associated with achieving goals, but that may come at the cost of more complex emotional experiences such as aesthetic appreciation, connection and meaning that come from simply being absorbed in activities with no specific end goal in mind.”