So you're saying it's a matter of lifestyle and not free time? Because here you're acknowledging they had free time, which goes against your argument "capitalism has ... given everybody enough free time from starvation to actually follow addictive pursuits", but drawing a distinction between things we have?
It almost seems like capitalism has brought us not free time, but an unquenchable desire for "having a house that is too large and filling it up with an inordinate amount of crap".
You know, if you go back and talk to any serf back in the day and I'm pretty sure that a very large percentage of them would want to be or lord or king themselves.
But would they want the latest and greatest hoe and have FOMO over someone else's vacation in the next village? It's not possible to be a lord and the serf would have known it, but we long for things that are attainable at a cost.
It almost seems like capitalism has brought us not free time, but an unquenchable desire for "having a house that is too large and filling it up with an inordinate amount of crap".