"golf, and do many things that require little mental facility"
Does golf really require that little mental facility? Would Tiger Woods agree with you?
People are extremely unpredictable in what they do with their leisure time. Over 10 years of working to encourage and develop amateur creators in the film world has left me with the conviction that we simply don't know what would happen if 100% of a Western country's people didn't need to work to survive any more.
We'd almost certainly hit a sudden epidemic of depression, to start with. Tim Ferriss' book "The Four Hour Work Week" has a fascinating section on surviving the transition to not having to work any more - it's harder than you'd think.
But subsequently? A surprising amount of popular activities in leisure time right now are actually very mentally engaging. Both watching and playing sports are actually reasonably mentally engaged activities for a lot of people - try memorising half the statistics that the average baseball fan has at his fingertips and see how far you get. The most popular drama television is getting more complex and sophisticated, not less. And of course games are actively mentally engaging, and increasingly creative - Minecraft's the biggest gaming sensation since World of Warcraft.
The fact that the two biggest gaming sensations of the last decade are ones in which the primary activities are a) working with groups of up to 40 other people to complete complex, challenging, multifaceted choreographed tasks and b) building massive structures up to and including 1-1 replicas of goddamn cathedrals does not lead me to believe that most of the population doesn't like to use their brain.
Add to that the fact that there's actually a startlingly large number of amateur musicians, painters, writers, bloggers, artisans, chefs and similar pursuits out there. Here's a link - http://www.amateurorchestras.org.uk/ - to a list of the 1,121 amateur ORCHESTRAS in the UK, for example.
You might see a very interesting world develop after about 10 years.
Does golf really require that little mental facility? Would Tiger Woods agree with you?
People are extremely unpredictable in what they do with their leisure time. Over 10 years of working to encourage and develop amateur creators in the film world has left me with the conviction that we simply don't know what would happen if 100% of a Western country's people didn't need to work to survive any more.
We'd almost certainly hit a sudden epidemic of depression, to start with. Tim Ferriss' book "The Four Hour Work Week" has a fascinating section on surviving the transition to not having to work any more - it's harder than you'd think.
But subsequently? A surprising amount of popular activities in leisure time right now are actually very mentally engaging. Both watching and playing sports are actually reasonably mentally engaged activities for a lot of people - try memorising half the statistics that the average baseball fan has at his fingertips and see how far you get. The most popular drama television is getting more complex and sophisticated, not less. And of course games are actively mentally engaging, and increasingly creative - Minecraft's the biggest gaming sensation since World of Warcraft.
The fact that the two biggest gaming sensations of the last decade are ones in which the primary activities are a) working with groups of up to 40 other people to complete complex, challenging, multifaceted choreographed tasks and b) building massive structures up to and including 1-1 replicas of goddamn cathedrals does not lead me to believe that most of the population doesn't like to use their brain.
Add to that the fact that there's actually a startlingly large number of amateur musicians, painters, writers, bloggers, artisans, chefs and similar pursuits out there. Here's a link - http://www.amateurorchestras.org.uk/ - to a list of the 1,121 amateur ORCHESTRAS in the UK, for example.
You might see a very interesting world develop after about 10 years.