You may be interested in what Ted Kaczynski says in his Manifesto. He hypothesizes that, with the majority of our biological needs fulfilled by society and tech

You may be interested in what Ted Kaczynski says in his Manifesto. He hypothesizes that, with the majority of our biological needs fulfilled by society and technology, we are left with mostly “surrogate activities”: activities which do not need doing, but we have to do something with our time. I work out a lot. That’s my surrogate activity. It’s something where I can push a boulder indefinitely like Sisyphus and there is no limit to how much I can do it. For others it is grinding on video games. For others, it is work (let’s be honest, how many of us can really say we “work to live” when all our money goes to consumer luxuries? Obviously situational). Once you start looking for it, you may notice a lot of people have surrogate activities. I’ll go a step further and say that activities which are more accessible and give someone a better chance to feel part of something larger than themselves lend them best to be surrogate activities. I also think tasks which have no end make particularly good surrogate activities.