Why I try to do things that are pointless.
When I was about 12 or 13, I used to spend a lot of time doing things that were pointless. In my case, this meant things like playing sports, riding my bike around, wandering around woods and fields with my mates, drawing pictures, and so on. There was no purpose, no fixed plan for the next hour or day, just doing and being.
This, of course, is typical of most kids at that age. Then the teenage years really kick in, a mish-mash of hormones, experimentation, exams and rites of passage. Next, it was the planning and scheming of my twenties for me, as I exited university and entered the professional workplace, setting long-term goals, without spending too much time considering whether I really wanted them. After that came the unconscious strategising and existential questioning of my thirties, always thinking about some objective, roadmap or point in the future.
Not much of it was spent doing things just for the sake of doing them. In other words, engaging in something just because I really wanted to, without any expectations. In other words, being present. In other words — living.
Why would you do something pointless?
To clarify, when I say ‘pointless’ things, I mean activities that don’t have clear targets, goals, rules, deadlines. They don’t serve any clear purpose or have any obvious extrinsic value. They’re things done just because doing them is fun, nourishing or meets some deeper inner urge.
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. (Corinthians)
We give up these pointless things as we grow older. The systems we enter (education, workplaces, society) and the responsibilities we take on (loans, relationships, children) encourage us to become ‘grown-up’ and leave behind the selfish, indulgence of childhood. Our role increasingly becomes to act in ways that create some form of value for us or others.
This is obviously an important transition in our growth as humans. How could we function as adults if we didn’t adapt to taking on this role? How could society operate if we didn’t act with some purpose and responsibility? We couldn’t build relationships, create businesses, develop careers, teach others or continue learning if we didn’t have an inclination to plan and produce things of value.
And yet, it feels to me, that we often go too far. We can become captivated by a primary concern to ‘produce value’: I must do x to achieve y which will help me get to z. It becomes our unconscious, or even conscious, mantra. Even our leisure time can become shaped by goals and targets — witness in the last decade, the explosion of marathon and ultra running, triathlon, cycle sportives and high-intensity training. Even supposedly mindful practices like yoga and meditation are now done with goals like weight-loss and productivity in mind.
It’s not that we don’t do fun or frivolous things. In fact, we find increasingly elaborate ways to do them that are pigeon-holed into specific time periods and places, often in the form of holidays. “I’ll chill out when I go on holiday” we tell ourselves, flying to somewhere far away in order to do so and we then find it difficult to ‘switch off’; in other words, to revert to doing things without purpose — but we eventually do just in time to get back on a flight home.
But most of the time, we are ‘units of production’, whose goal is to produce extrinsic value. We’ve bought into the mantra of achievement and attainment at the expense of things that hold a much greater long-term benefit.
Bringing the playfulness back.
As we enter into adulthood, things that don’t serve a clear value can seem frivolous, puerile, a waste of precious time, particularly when there are more pressing concerns such as mortgages and children to look after. It’s not without irony though, that spending time with your children is so much fun in part because it encourages play and improvisation.
The things I loved doing as a child, without questioning why or summoning any deep mental effort, were simple: being outdoors, playing sport, reading books, writing, drawing. With the exception of playing sport, I gradually gave up these things as I moved into adulthood, only to reclaim and reintegrate most of them much later when I realised how much I enjoyed them.
It’s no coincidence that sport and fitness was the one exception, as they were the easiest activities for me to translate into goal-driven ones. Running became about doing 10k races, a half-marathon and then eventually a marathon — almost entirely so my ego could attain those badges of achievement. There was very little of me that ran those 26-miles for the pure joy of doing so. Football became very competitive, to the extent I had surgery three times to repair injuries. Going to the gym was all about increasing muscle to bulk up and look better.
Gradually, and long overdue, I realised the importance of play. I felt fatigued by having a goal or target for everything. I began to do things just because I enjoyed them. I now cycle long-distances but with no time record in mind, only because I genuinely enjoy being on my bike (it reminds me of being a kid). I read a lot of non-fiction books, but only because I genuinely enjoy learning from them. I hike up mountains, not to get a first ascent or break records but because I love the outdoors. I increasingly seek out activities and habits that anchor me in the present moment and serve no purpose other than to feed some inner urge for joy and play.
The importance of being pointless
I recently read a memoir called ‘Barbarian Days’ written by journalist William Finnegan. The author recounts growing up in 1950s California and falling in love with surfing at a young age. It never held any promise of a career but became a lifelong obsession and in his early twenties, he and a friend travelled to remote parts of the world seeking out and riding waves in obscure places. As he grew older and his life took on a different meaning, his relationship with surfing changed but it has remained an integral part of his life, core to his identity — in part because of its utter uselessness.
At one point, Finnegan recounts how his pursuit of surf in remote parts of Asia began to rub up against his own expanding world view and a battle against the feeling that he should be doing something more obviously valuable: “In the meantime, surfing became an excellent refuge from the conflict — a consuming, physically exhausting, joy-drenched reason to live. It also, in its vaguely outlaw uselessness, its disengagement from productive labor, neatly expressed one’s disaffection.”
“Vaguely outlaw uselessness”. I love that phrase. It evokes something important.
Back when I was 12, there was a corner of our school playground that had an inadvertent but perfectly formed 7-a-side goal. We’d spend summer days playing football there, sometimes spending an entire afternoon practicing free-kicks and penalties. I could literally spend hours observing the clean arc of a ball as we tried to dip it into the corner of that goal, completely captivated by the one simple thing I was engaged in at that moment. Even when we did hit that spot, we’d attempt to replicate it endlessly. It was like being under a beautiful spell. As adults, we now call this being in flow.
Reintegrating pointlessness.
What I’ve learned in my path to allowing some pointlessness back into my life is that it takes practice and commitment — I need to break the guilt I associate with not doing something of value all the time. What I do know is that it makes for a happier, more creative and less judgmental person. So here’s three things to mull on, that I’m still working on myself:
Play is vital. Doing something that is utterly pointless other than it is fun and engaging, releases us from structured thinking. It creates a space where anything can happen and we allow ourselves to think in different ways without the burden of a goal or plan.
Stillness is precious but also rare. We are accustomed and conditioned to constant entertainment that means we never, ever have to be bored again. Even waiting in line for a coffee can mean an opportunity to check emails or social media. Choosing to do nothing and accepting an absence of stimulation can allow space for rare reflections and our greatest ideas.
Presentness brings clarity and focus through immersion in or commitment to an activity, that allows us to operate in flow. Mindfulness and play are great at enabling this state and it can also lead to an impact in the way we commit to other activities — including having better conversations with the people around us.
We could all do with a bit more pointlessness in our lives. It’s not at the expense of productive or purposeful activity, but alongside it — they complement each other. More importantly, we need to do things just for the sake of doing them, for this is one of the incredible privileges we get as humans — we’re much, much more than units of production. We get to experience the world in its fullest as conscious beings, if we choose to do so. Every now and then, we can take off the guardrails, put down the rule book, switch off the phones and just do something that makes us feel alive in this very moment.
