The-Conquest-of-Happiness-by-Bertrand-Russell

must have been boredom as much as anything that
led to the practice of witch-hunts as the sole sport
by which winter evenings could be enlivened.
We are less bored than our ancestors were, but we
are more afraid of boredom. We have come to
know, or rather to believe, that boredom is not part
of the natural lot of man, but can be avoided by a
sufficiently vigorous pursuit of excitement.
Girls nowadays earn their own living, very largely
because this enables them to seek excitement in the
evening and to escape ‘the happy family time’ that
their grandmothers had to endure. Everybody who
can lives in a town; in America, those who cannot,
have a car, or at the least a motor-bicycle, to take
them to the movies. And of course they have the
radio in their houses. Young men and young
women meet each other with much less difficulty
than was formerly the case, and every housemaid
expects at least once a week as much excitement as
would have lasted a Jane Austen heroine
throughout a whole novel.