I'm not sure that this little nugget of wisdom has withstood the test of time. The average number of hours worked has fallen dramatically since the 30s[0] even as interest in passive entertainment has skyrocketed.

[0]https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/

The core of it stands that 'urban populations have become mainly passive'. Perhaps I'd consider revising to replace passive with consumers. So, we've been taught and continually urged to spend our idle hours consuming. So, it isn't a surprise to me that most folks don't know any other way to spend their time.

Consumption usually costs money and increases money velocity, which leads to a better economy. So it's a bit different than "idleness."

A better economy... Please define "better".

Money is worse when its velocity is low. This is associated with hoarding of cash.

The world could have 10000T in cash but if no exchange happens, everyone is poor.

Endless consumption is a delusion, regardless of how much "better" the economy appears.

Idleness doesn't necessitate consumption, and it's interesting that that conclusion was jumped to.

Leisure != time outside of work. If you're commuting, if you're too exhausted to get off the couch, if you're on-call and worrying about interruptions, then you're not truly at leisure.

> as interest in passive entertainment has skyrocketed

I would like to see some data on this. It may seem like it but I would say it's quite the opposite.

Why do you think so?

I dunno. Here is just one random stat that came to mind. Boston marathon participation throughout the years

  1897 - 18
  1930 - 218
  1970 - 1174
  2000 - 17813
  2019 - 30234

https://www.baa.org/races/boston-marathon/results/participat...

Still, would be interesting to see some comprehensive study on active leisure.

Meh. I would bet that has way more to do with the cost of travelling to Boston for the average person around the world and the growth in prestige of that particular event.

Also, athleisure is "active" in the literal sense, but is it contributing anything back to society? I guess one could argue it collectively reduces the cost of our growing passiveness. But I would argue, as someone who loves exercising, that exercise is just a video game that makes you feel progressively better the longer you play it instead of worse. It doesn't serve a broader purpose beyond a certain point of basic health, unless you are so good that other people derive satisfaction from your accomplishments (pro athlete) or you are doing it to form social connections (golf, intramural sports leagues, etc.) or like break a world record or something.

Why do you associate those things specifically with urban life? Cinemas, televised sports, and listening to music are pretty broadly-enjoyed things. I don’t think they’re particularly “passive” either, but they’re certainly not uniquely urban.

When I think of unique opportunities in urban environments, I’m thinking more along the lines of nightlife, live sports, music, and theatre, boutique shopping, art galleries, etc. which I don’t consider to be particularly “passive” activities either.

Yeah, I think Russell got this one wrong and Vonnegut got it right. Consuming-all, creating-none became normal because of mass media. Its availability drove down the social value of playing on an unremarkable, very-local sports team, or playing the piano unremarkably, or singing, or being pretty good at telling a story (but not as good as the radio), and so on.

Know what you see references to all the time in previous centuries? Reading aloud as entertainment among family and friends, sometimes even in public places, and even staging little dramas at home. Kids might do the latter still, a bit, but one gets the impression it was much more common then. People didn't stop doing that because they were working more, they stopped because radio was invented.

When there was no radio or gramophone, if you could play the piano tolerably well and sing a little you were, to your social circle, hot shit. Not so much afterward. You could play a pick-up game on the green off town square against a neighboring town and people would show up and watch with enthusiasm. When things were expected to be repaired and a blanket might cost quite a damn bit to buy, being able to sew pretty well or being fairly handy at woodworking was far more valuable than it is now. Mass production has driven the social (and economic) value of both way down.

Direct personal enjoyment wasn't the only thing one could hope to get from all those "leisure" activities.

Oh, your sketches and watercolors? Yeah they're nice I guess. Have you seen Deviantart? Instagram? I follow 200 artists better than you, from around the globe, and most of them aren't even good enough to make any money at it. And so on. Social value approaching zero.

I agree it is more about this kind of raising the bar than "lack of free time". I can't even stand watching college-level sports anymore because the quality of play is so low compared to getting the best 500 or 1000 people on the planet together in a professional league.

That said, I think there's also room for a new kind of very-local active-not-passive activity to spring up. We already see the beginning of this with mass tourism and the rise of mass-amateur photography thanks to digital cameras and cell phones.

Does anyone really think their picture of the Grand Canyon taken on their iPhone is better than the thousands of professional photos already taken of it? Yet people (me included!) continue to take pictures.

I'm not really sure exactly what form it will take but that kind of "sure but I haven't personally experienced it" take feels like it might re-open the doors that were slammed shut by the kind of mass media effect you describe.

Compound that with a kind of long-tail niche of hyperlocal activities and there's more scope for hope in the future. Sure things like theater and music have been are a lost cause. But maybe birdwatching in a nearby national park? Or groups that handle beach cleanup or beach erosion?

Maybe we're just in the middle of a (long) transition toward those kind of things.

The photos of Grand Canyon require literally no time investment into building a skill. I think this is about as much (i.e. zero) as most people are willing to invest into totally non-productive hobbies right now.

For instance, many people are still gardening - not only because they like it, but also because the product, a beautiful garden, makes the effort worth it for them. I doubt many people would still garden if we could just display an equivalent garden in their AR glasses - similarly to how almost no one plays the instrument now because we've got recordings of music.

That is a quote from Russell from 1932 written before desegregation, white flight, and the explosion of the suburbs so the differences between urban and rural life was far more stark than it is today. The big networks like NBC and CBS were born just a few years before and it took them until WWII IIRC to really penetrate into all the rural areas of the US (in the 1930 census only 40% of households owned a radio, mostly as a sign of middle class wealth in urban areas). Sports teams could only be supported by relatively high densities of people because television wasn't yet a major source of revenue.

Today's equivalent would be smartphones, which are definitely harder to use the further out you are from civilization (I've got no reception 40 minutes from DT San Diego!)

Because at the time Russell wrote that (1932), the Suburbs didn't exist yet. If you didn't live in the city, you were agrarian; think sharecroppers living with dirt floors (the dust bowl/Grapes of Wrath were the 1930's). Most "modern" leisure activities were only enjoyed by urbanites.