I know very little about chess, but to me it feels that any such activity is kind of relative to how exactly you're engaging with the activity, and what skills

I know very little about chess, but to me it feels that any such activity is kind of relative to how exactly you're engaging with the activity, and what skills you already possess. Arguably, if it benefits you via learning new things/skills, it also benefits the humanity because later you'll apply these skills at something else. So for example we can 'classify' the returns from engaging with chess depending on your current skills: - playing a (single) game of chess - high if you never played chess or games like that before. A lot of it is a very transferable skill that applies to other games, and more importantly, real world reasoning - medium if you don't know chess but familiar with similar games (e.g. checkers/go) -- you might advance your skill - low if you're a good chess player -- you just maintain your chess skill? also of course it could still be beneficial if playing it makes you relaxed and happy, nothing wrong with this -- just in that sense it's not objectively better than idk, watching a tv show - writing a brute force algorithm to play chess - high if you're new to algorithms - low if you're an experienced with algorithms (basically just yet another interview problem) - writing an AI to play chess - high for most programmers - not so useful if you're a member of AlphaZero team? Now replace chess with Minecraft or Starcraft or anything else, and all these statements probably still stand. Most humans would benefit from writing a novel.. but if you're already a good writer, it would probably have low benefit. Not sure what would be the algebraic geometry equivalent though :)