I have written a long essay for Aeon about the instrumentalisation of everything: how nothing seems to be of value in itself anymore, but is only seen as useful in the service of some utilitarian function, usually better well-being, mental and/or physical. All that is good in life is being promoted not for its own sake but for the benefits it brings. It’s a piece I’ve thought about and worked on a lot and if you can only spare me a little of your time, skip the rets of this email and read it.
I had to leave a whole section out, which I’d like to share with you here. The essay focuses on the fundamental mistake of making things like nature, art, learning and friendship means to ends rather than valuable for their own sakes. But there are two other problems with instrumentalisation that I didn’t have space to go into.
First, in many cases it seems that the instrumental rewards are oversold. The root cause of this is the basic weakness of the kind of social psychology and health research used to support the existence of the benefits. It is an uncontroversial truth that people tend to feel better when they do new things and meet more people, and that their health improves when they become more active. So if you look at, say, whether people report improved mood if they start going to a knitting circle, the answer is almost certainly going to be yes. But it would also be affirmative if they joined a reading group, as long as they have a basic interest in reading. Similarly, gardening involves physical work, so people who take it up are bound to get a health boost, but no more so than if they had taken up badminton or breakdancing.
However, when the studies are reported, it is always as though the particular activity in question was somehow significant for the result. Once you realise that this is not necessarily the case, you see that virtually every claim for specific instrumental benefits of something is actually a generic one. I am sure that learning a foreign language is good for your cognitive health, but so is doing sudoku or maths. Using your brain is good for your brain, however you do it.
Even when research does identify a specific benefit, that is often besides the point. Consider sport. Each one exercises different muscles and puts a different load on your cardiovascular system. If one sport is especially good for your glutes, or builds strength, a different one would have been better for your abs or your stamina. Similarly, one mental activity might be good for improving factual memory, one for building language skills, another for numeracy. Nothing is equally good for everything, so knowing an activity is especially good for one thing is only important if that thing is something you particularly need.
Furthermore, it is not at all clear that you will get the claimed benefits of an activity if getting them becomes your primary motivation. Take social connection. As I write, I have just heard of a study that says that doing anything – even reading – is better for us when we do it with others than alone. This message is now widely broadcast and understood, so people know that social connection is important for their mental and physical health. But one of the most valuable features of friendship and community is how they takes us out of concern for ourselves and makes us more aware of the needs of others. To get the most out of socialising we need to do it in the right spirit, choosing to be with other people because we care for them and they for us, because we find them stimulating, because we enjoy being part of a collective experience or endeavour. So if we choose to mingle not for these but for well-being reasons, we are probably not going to get the benefits that socialising usually brings. I doubt there is much if any benefit in mere exposure to other people, since being in company you don’t want to keep is many people’s idea of hell.
Or take forest bathing. Many claim that the benefits are due to inhaling phytoncides, the volatile organic compounds emitted from the trees’ essential oils. It is ironic that this highly reductive biochemical explanation is embraced by so many who believe that the reason we need to forest bathe in the first place is that our technological society has left us “so far removed from nature” and that “forest bathing is one way to restore that connection and enrich your experience on this planet.” More likely is that the main benefits are that human beings enjoy being in nature, breathing fresh air and moving their bodies. You’ll get the physical parts of these benefits whatever the spirit in which you walk, but you certainly won’t have the experience of escaping your daily and self-centred concerns and deeply connecting with the natural world if you’re thinking about how many hours of exposure to which kinds of trees are needed to make sure your investment in the walk pays off.
Even the purely physical benefits of many activities can be harder to obtain if our motivations become too instrumental. When we exert our bodies in the service of something we enjoy for its own sake, we do so more enthusiastically and more frequently. I would play a lot less tennis, less intensively, if I were only doing it for my health. The same goes for walking. We know that motivation is the key to a sustainable exercise routine and that people do not find the abstract idea that something is good for them very inspiring. That’s why I quit a gym two decades ago in the middle of a session on a rowing machine: it may have been the ultimate workout but I simply couldn’t force myself to endure it any longer.
It has long been well understood by sages and psychologists that happiness is not best achieved by its direct pursuit but comes as a side-effect of doing what we most value in life. The same is true is many other good things. The key to a healthy diet, for example, is to find healthy foods that you enjoy eating for their gastronomic qualities, not their nutritional ones. The best way to stay fit is to find things that you enjoy which also have the benefit of making you move. Instrumentalisation has the illusion of efficiency because it promotes the direct pursuit of practical things that we all want. But often this turns out to be counter-productive. What look like short cuts turn out to be short circuits, undermining what they seek to achieve.
* These stories invariably turn out to be grossly misreported. In this case the council had banned wreaths being hung on the doors of flats, not to avoid offending non-Christians, but because of the fire risk. Given the Grenfell Tower tragedy a few years ago, when 70 people were killed in a fire at the local authority run building, this seems more like sensible caution than “political correctness gone mad”.