[wool_gather]

I'm just as cynical and misanthropic as the next HN poster, but I do wonder about this.

My hunch is that many people would indeed find something other than mindless TV if they weren't having their intellectual/emotional energy used up on a daily basis by a job. Not all people, maybe not even most, but many.

What they got up to instead is a whole nother question, but I do really think that the typical human would find something active to do, given no forced use of their time.

[TeMPOraL]

I strongly second this. Most people tend to be pretty used up after a day at work, and after commute, errands and household chores, TV is pretty much all they have energy for.

Personally, I hang out with regular "normies" as much, if not more, as with technical people, and all the boring TV-watching "normies" I know do have dreams and hobbies, but it takes getting to know them better to discover that. And those dreams and hobbies are generally blocked by dayjobs and errands.