Why Being Useful Can Become a Trap

Kitchens are very good at rewarding usefulness. During a busy service nobody particularly cares about your inner journey; they care that table twelve is waiting, something is running low, a delivery has arrived wrong, somebody has called in sick and the printer has apparently decided that now would be a lovely time to produce eighteen tickets at once. You deal with the problem, then the next one, then whatever catches fire after that.

I remember standing in a kitchen during a busy service with timings, stock, staffing, prep and deliveries all running through my head while another small part of my brain was trying to remember whether I had signed a school form at home that morning. From the outside I probably looked completely in control. Food was leaving the pass, people were getting answers and problems were being dealt with. I was doing what I was good at, and there is genuine satisfaction in that. Being capable feels good. Being trusted feels good. Knowing that somebody can hand you a problem and you will probably find a way through it feels good.

It isn't difficult to see how that becomes part of your identity. You become the reliable one, and eventually that description follows you beyond work. You're the person who notices the job everybody else has walked past, remembers something needs doing, makes the phone call, fixes the thing or makes the decision nobody particularly wants to make. The more often you prove that you can handle things, the less often people feel the need to ask whether you can. They simply assume you will.

There is an obvious downside to that because capable people tend to get given more to carry, but I don't think the story is as simple as everybody taking advantage of the reliable person. Sometimes we are rather involved in creating the arrangement ourselves. We complain that nobody else sorts anything, then step in before anybody has a chance. We say we want help, but discover that what we actually want is help done properly which, by an astonishing coincidence, usually means done exactly the way we would have done it.

I've caught myself doing that often enough to know there is something more complicated going on than simple martyrdom. Being needed can be exhausting, but it can also be reassuring. Every problem solved gives you another little piece of evidence that you have a place here. People trust me. People come to me. Things work better when I'm involved.

None of those are unhealthy thoughts by themselves. In fact, I'd be more concerned if I felt absolutely no pride in being dependable to the people around me. The problem begins when those small pieces of evidence start answering a much bigger question than they were designed to answer. Somewhere along the way, I am useful can start quietly standing in for I matter.

That changes what happens when nobody needs you.

You would think an afternoon with no urgent job, no work problem, no lift required, nobody asking what happens next and nothing around the house that absolutely has to be dealt with would feel like winning the lottery. Sometimes it does. Other times, an uncomfortable amount of empty space appears. You check messages that could easily wait, notice a job that wasn't particularly bothering anybody ten minutes ago, or start tidying something because apparently there is always another cupboard available if you are sufficiently determined not to sit still.

Maybe some of that is simply personality. I like doing things and I don't think every inability to sit motionless needs a psychological explanation. But sometimes I think there is something else underneath it. When there is no immediate demand, there is also no obvious role to perform, and for somebody who has spent years understanding himself as the chef, provider, parent, fixer or person who gets things done, that can leave a surprisingly awkward question behind: what do I actually want to do?

I can usually tell you what needs doing fairly quickly. I can tell you what needs sorting around the house, what bill needs paying, what needs buying, what probably needs fixing and which job I should have dealt with three weeks ago. Ask me what I want to do with several completely obligation-free hours and the answer has not always arrived with the same confidence.

That would be easy to turn into a story about adulthood gradually stealing the interesting parts of life, but I don't think that's true. Responsibility has given my life a huge amount of meaning. Being a husband matters to me. Being a dad matters to me. Providing matters. Doing my job properly matters. Being somebody other people can trust matters. I have no interest in replacing all of that with some version of self-care where everybody else can fend for themselves while I concentrate on protecting my peace.

Sometimes people really do need us. Children need feeding, money needs earning and work needs doing. Your partner might have very little left one week and need you to carry more of the load. Families go through periods where one person has to absorb more because somebody else simply cannot. Sometimes sacrifice isn't evidence of a broken boundary; sometimes it's just love.

But love and responsibility do not require the person doing the carrying to gradually disappear from their own life.

That, I think, is where usefulness can become a trap. Not when you care about being dependable, but when being dependable becomes such a complete description of you that almost everything else starts looking optional. The hobby gets pushed aside because evenings are busy. The project waits because something more practical deserves the time. Seeing friends starts feeling like another piece of admin. Being a beginner at something feels strangely wasteful because being bad at something takes time and energy without producing much in return.

Every one of those decisions can make perfect sense when you make it. That's precisely why they can accumulate for years without looking like a problem. Then somebody asks what you do for fun and you find yourself mentally searching through hobbies you haven't actually done for ages.

That doesn't mean you need to recover some lost version of yourself from twenty years ago. There are several parts of twenty-year-old me that can stay exactly where they are. People change, interests change and life moves on. What interests me more is the point where almost everything that remains starts having to justify itself by being useful.

Rest needs to be earned. A hobby feels more legitimate if it produces something. Asking for help feels worse than being exhausted. Saying no feels like letting somebody down, even when they would probably cope perfectly well without you. Somebody else successfully handles a problem and, instead of feeling relieved, you feel oddly displaced.

Those moments might be worth paying attention to because usefulness can become an unusually comfortable place to hide. The world tends to reward you for being there. Nobody stages an intervention because you remembered the school form, stayed late to sort a problem or became the person everybody could rely on. Quite the opposite. You're dependable. Hard-working. Committed. A good parent. A good partner.

Those things can all be true.

So can the possibility that the role everybody values has been given so much room that you have stopped noticing the person living inside it.

I don't think the answer is to deliberately become less dependable, nor do I think every tired parent or overworked employee needs to embark on a grand search for their authentic self. Most of us have enough to do already without turning identity into another project. I suspect it is enough, at least initially, to stop asking usefulness to prove things it was never meant to prove.

Doing something useful proves that you did something useful. Helping somebody means you helped somebody. Solving a problem means the problem got solved. None of those things need to become evidence that you deserved the afternoon, earned the right to rest or justified your place in somebody else's life.

Maybe that's why the empty afternoon interests me. For once, nothing is immediately telling you who you are supposed to be. You aren't needed as the chef, the fixer, the problem solver or the person everybody is waiting for. There is just some time in front of you, and it doesn't particularly care whether you do anything useful with it.

Ask me what needs doing and I can probably give you a list.

Ask me what I want when none of it needs doing, and I'm not completely sure I always know.