The anxiety of not knowing when or how you're going to be able to support yourself and/or your dependents can have a pretty chilling effect on one's openness to experience and idle creativity. It's very easy to get yourself into a cycle of existential paralysis where you can't/don't allow yourself any opportunity to do something normally considered "frivolous" despite the fact that there's no real opportunity for you to do something normally considered "useful".

Even though the actual opportunity cost of doing something "frivolous" is zero given the circumstances, the self-imposed perceived cost could feel much higher. There's a difference between not knowing what to do with oneself and feeling like one shouldn't be doing any of those things.