A lot of what you mention seems to be controlled. I recently watched a documentary called The Century of Self. I myself have never liked this form of science, but they Freud type people have gotten it down pat.

We used to have much much more leisure time than we have now. That time was spent on improving our lives, on making things easier on our self. We would sit in very distant times around a camp fire after a hard day of hunting or gathering and talk to each other, work on improving our spear points, on creating our clothing and protective gear, and on where the best hunting area was and or gathering area.

Then we grew in size and scope of our small tribe, we began to specialize and teach other our specialties. This was exchanged in a friendly way and means, of still sitting around a fire perhaps or spending some of our leisure time pursuing other interest that we heard about from a previous day.

Now we are nothing but consumers. We are told what we want, what we need, what we have to do, and how we have to do it. The leisure has been removed from life.