It is only as the apprehended ulterior futility of a given line of action enters the reflective complex of consciousness as an element essentially alien to the normally purposeful trend of the life process that its disquieting and deterrent effect on the consciousness of the agent is wrought.
The individual's habits of thought make an organic complex, the trend of which is necessarily in the direction of serviceability to the life process.

When it is attempted to assimilate systematic waste or futility, as an end in life, into this organic complex, there presently supervenes a revulsion.

But this revulsion of the organism may be avoided if the attention can be confined to the proximate, unreflected purpose of dexterous or emulative exertion.

Sports--hunting, angling, athletic games, and the like--afford an exercise for dexterity and for the emulative ferocity and astuteness characteristic of predatory life.
So long as the individual is but slightly gifted with reflection or with a sense of the ulterior trend of his actions so long as his life is substantially a life of naive impulsive action--so long the immediate and unreflected purposefulness of sports, in the way of an expression of dominance, will measurably satisfy his instinct of workmanship.

This is especially true if his dominant impulses are the unreflecting emulative propensities of the predaceous temperament.