Whatever dissipates physical or mental power obviously never re-creates. Many eminent men have found almost all the recreation they required through switching from one activity to another, through taking up some entirely different subject, even though it also called for mental exertion.

Too many of us, especially when young, confound recreation with dissipation. Real recreation quickens aspiration. The true purpose of recreation is not merely to amuse, not merely to afford us pleasure, not merely to “kill time,” but to increase our fitness, enhance our usefulness, spur achievement. Any form of recreation that impairs either our physical or mental efficiency does not recreate.

The main point is that your recreation shall be helpful, not hurtful; then the quantity is likely to regulate itself sensibly. The brain grows on what it feeds. The starved brain cannot and will not produce brainy work. Recreation should re-create, rejuvenate and reinvigorate the brain cells as well as the red corpuscles of the blood.

(Bertie Forbes, “Recreation,” in Keys to Success: Personal Efficiency (New York: B. C. Forbes, 1918) 222-230.)