I lean toward “efficient entertainment”, but I do sometimes wonder what that chunk of my free time would look like otherwise.
You can find newspaper articles from the late 1800s IIRC, that decry the slothful youth wasting all their time reading novels instead of playing outside like the glorious generation before them
Longer than that. 2500 years ago ancient greek philosophers complained about the youth in the same ways.
One of the oldest written works that we have, and can translate, was written centuries before the Roman empire and it is complaining about “kids these days”.
This crap has been going on for millennia.
The counts of the indictment are luxury, bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect to elders, and a love for chatter in place of exercise. …
Children began to be the tyrants, not the slaves, of their households. They no longer rose from their seats when an elder entered the room; they contradicted their parents, chattered before company, gobbled up the dainties at table, and committed various offences against Hellenic tastes, such as crossing their legs. They tyrannised over the paidagogoi and schoolmasters.
It is commonly attributed to Socrates or Plato, but apparently the real quote was made by some student for his Cambridge Dissertation in 1907