In the old days? Back-breaking work that's no longer necessary or efficient.
In the slightly less old days, probably socialize.
Nothing super productive or world changing I assume. I would also guess that a lot of these hours are spent sleeping rather than actively watching. Most people I know put comfort shows on to help them fall asleep these days.
I think socializing is world changing. So many of the global systemic problems we face are either caused by or exacerbated by a lack of social cohesion.
Its interesting to think if only people not waste their time, how productive they would be. Then you realize how hard it is to get successful in life in terms of work, how every single idea and product / service has so many competitors, and you become glad that so many people don't do anything but waste their time :)
I don't know that I can agree with the common view that back in the "old days" life was just tons of back breaking work. Yeah it was definitely more labor heavy, but people didn't have the nutrition to keep up with the heavy workload people assume these days and not be crippled by 40, which we know they weren't outside of accidents. Plus it would make all the art, monuments, religious ceremony, technological and social advancements, war, and other time and energy consuming activities near impossible if people just barely managed to survive. And there are tons of games from antiquity that people wouldn't invent and been playing if they were working all the time. Especially when you consider it would have been even harder during bronze age or stone age eras with even less technology and knowledge. And farming work just doesn't keep bringing gains by working all through the year. Crops take time to grow and can only be harvested at certain times. You are wasting effort keeping planting past the spring because you will get worse and worse returns on it and at some point you won't be able to harvest or eat it all before it rots anyways.
People worked for themselves and did what they needed to survive and live how they wanted, and doing more beyond that gave worse and worse returns that eventually people will stop for not having much value. Chopping 5+ years of wood ahead of time gains nothing because without a ridiculously large building to store it in it, which also requires more maintenance, will rot and lose energy and become less valuable over time. There is no point in making a lifetime's worth of your own clothes now if it is just going to get eaten by moths and fungus after being stored for 10-20 years. You are only going to get slightly ahead to head off bad times and then stop producing after that.
One of the biggest rallying points behind the 19th and 20th century labor movements was people wanting to return to the lower working hours that their grandparents and great grandparents worked living a far more subsistence lifestyle, and is how we came up with a 40 hour work week, which also assumed having time for the multitude of religious holidays and seasonal breaks in work they also enjoyed, and was still a mere compromise between the two lifestyles.
During Q4 2022 the average US adult spent 294 minutes per day with TV, down slightly from 303 during Q4 2019. [1].
Nothing says restorative and important like sitting stationary on a coach watching TV for 5 hours per day while obesity and mental health issues are at an all time high. Its def important for advertisers. Stop excusing lazy and slovenly behaviors.
