alt Hacker NewsIt's possible that I'm in your grandparent's generation, or maybe your parents. I'm 65. I don't want to derail the conversation, but I do want to correct the bit about "exercise as a hobby was viewed as extremely weird, runners used to be arrested!". In the '70s at least, running was extremely normal. Endurance bicycling was normal. For instance, starting in 1979. I bicycled all over the South: FL GA NC, at least. These were then as they are now quite provincial from the POV of alternate ideas. 10K runs were a thing, with thousands of participants. As were Marathons. Cross country running was a popular high school sport.
If you want to talk about work, well I'm adjacent to 5th generation farmers. Self driving climate controlled machinery is a thing now, but! hard to imagine I know, people had tractors back then too.
So, plausible as it might sound to ascribe some of the causality to flow from "the physical activity transition", I don't think it holds up.
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I can't remember which decade he's talking about or verify his claims, but in Shoe Dog the creator of Nike talks about how running for exercise was viewed as very weird in the last century, and he implies that Adidas pretty much singlehandedly changed public perception on this. Not that nobody did it, but that it was considered very weird and rare.
He was only talking about running, not exercise in general, but I seem to remember Schwarzenegger reflecting similarly about the public perception of weight lifting
I'm about 5 years younger and yes running and exercise was popular in the 1970s. Maybe not quite like today in terms of people really spending a lot of money on gyms, personal trainers, and expensive bikes or equipment, but certainly not considered weird.
I think the physical activity transition they are describing would have been closer to the end of the 19th century when mechanization really started to take hold (e.g. the car)