How do you balance that with the need for money to afford things in life though? There's a lot of things I could go do if I didn't have to think about bills to pay.
If you do things for money, you optimize not for fun, but for return of (time) investment. Which is only fun if you have other issues.
Edit: Also people were having more kids back then and earlier in life, so they had less time for hobbies and "finding one's self", they'd be busy with their kids and work.
The bored DINKS with free time looking for hobbies is a relatively recent phenomenon in western societies (10-15 years).
With this logic, nobody also "needs" to buy a Ford F-250 Super Duty, a MacBook Pro M5, an RTX 5090, a recreational boat, drink Starbucks daily, etc if your definition of "needs" is just limited to day survival meaning just providing food and shelter but nothing more, and yet people buy them anyway, because it's entertainment, not because they need them to survive.
People will still want escapism and entertainment ESPECIALLY when their lives suck, like in times of economic depression, be it cigarettes, booze, junk food, porn, games, gambling, movies and TV shows, etc, even if you think people don't "need" them. This is how people function. It's scientifically documented.
Its disingenuous to describe those new expenses without considering those that largely have been replaced.
It used to be normal to pay for cable TV which was outrageously expensive. They used to go to movie theatres on a regular basis, and collect physical media for movies and music and games and tv. Etc.
Lol but I went to a flea market the other day with $100 thinking that was going to go far — I managed to buy one jacket for $80. So… I dunno.
The ability to be a small time artist, musician, etc and live in the 90s depended on the combined effects of technology and local organisations. You could play on pirate radio, you could go on benefits without too much hassle, you could stay at a squat, you could make your own physical products cheaply, there were lots of venues to play at, you could sell your products for cash and keep it.
The internet makes the distribution of music files cheap and easy, but combined with the increased technologising of society, the rest of the infrastructure that made the 90s a time where culture felt like it was on an e-rush with everyone else have fallen apart.
I notice that all the advertising examples you listed are about spending time and not money, I'm wondering if there's something there?
You're right. The economy is... fucked. The "great wealth transfer" will be vacuumed up quickly, and it'll get worse.
World of Warcraft (of all things) had this kind of issue with stats and damage numbers getting into the absurd range, so they did a stat crunch. We need a global stat crunch.
- An older neighbor counseling the has-things-relatively-great-but-unhappy-anyway protagonist in Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road
Rinse and repeat.
You think 19th century workers had time for 8h of hobbies per day? Let me have what you've been smoking because that's some good stuff.
>when people's leisure time is being eaten up by their commute and other responsibilities
You think 19th century people had no/less responsibilities?
How out of touch do you have to be to see yourself as more oppressed than 19th century workers, when you have abundant food in the supermarkets you don't have to farm, door to door food delivery, online solvable bureaucracy, cars, planes, ambulances and emergency rooms with MRIs, CT scanners and cures for most diseases, OSHA, social security, longest life expectancy ever in the history of mankind, residential heating and cooling at your fingertips, etc. stuff even kings in the 19th century didn't have, a society where you can live a life where you never have to leave your house if you don't want to, yet somehow you think workers had a more leisurely life back then. WHAT?!
> 15 hours work.
Put yourself in the position of an employer trying to start/run a business today. Are your customers gonna pay you extra so you can pay your workers for their private chores and commute?