It makes it easy to experience perfection without doing anything. You can feel the perfect romance of beautiful people, and take a perfect vacation - without actively doing anything yourself.
But that raises your expectations for everything. So you don't do anything yourself anymore, you just consume.
That, combined with a meaningless work, or rather a busyness fetish (dont want to be seen as lazy even though you're not productive), creates the mordern life.
No, thank you. I take imperfection and less neuroticism (and less work hours) any day over this.
You have a fundamentally different view of leisure time than what Bertrand Russel is talking about. In his view, leisure is something in which one has to be actively engaged in. Modern television, however, outsources much of this: laugh tracks are a prime example, but another example would be the BBC's Sherlock series which doesn't make it possible for the viewer to figure out "who done it", it only has Sherlock swoop in and connect dots that were never shown.
As I said, I don’t think the issue is one of time. It’s more that there is a massive industrial complex pushing you to consume, click, engage, etc., while cultural movements that encourage creating things and active engagement are niche at best.
But the quote never mentioned insufficient time, only insufficient energy.
> This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work;
This lack of energy makes people passively consume, e.g. listen to the radio (as the quote mentions), or watch TV (as you mention). Rather it's the notion that people's energy's are so drained from (often seemingly meaningless) work, that they have no desire to do anything but just consume idly. I don't know if that's true or not, but I personally do feel it is. When I'm doing 40-60 hour workweeks, I've got no desire to do anything that isn't largely passive. Whereas when I worked 20 hours at most, I was always busy teaching myself something or building something.
I've always felt like forty hours is less than ideal, but I don't see the connection with meaninglessness. During the period in my life when I had an unchallenging job[1], I found myself ravenous for active mental work after-hours: I'd learn new things in my field, read econ papers constantly[2], and it was probably the most productive adult period of my music-learning life. Now that I have an intense, very intellectually challenging job, I understand for the first time in my life why people might want to watch TV, especially at the regularity that most do it.
[1] I wouldn't describe it as meaningless, but it wasn't intellectually challenging at all
[2] I have a minor in econ, so enough to understand many papers at a relatively superficial level
I realize this is a little off-topic, but this is something that the original Holmes did as well. Almost every story was solved because Holmes had already spent time "off-camera" doing things, or already happened to know about obscure poisons, etc. It all feels very deus-ex-machina.
It wasn't until the Agatha Christie era when it became customary for mysteries to show all of the clues that the Detective encounters to be also given to the Reader, so that the reader can try to figure it out before the detective exposes things.
from the previous comment
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption
I really don’t think working a 40-hour a week job is the hold up here.