Surely most people in the US have hobbies at least in the minimal sense of downtime activities that they enjoy. It may not be golf or hobby programming, but even laying on the couch watching football is a "hobby" or sorts and takes up just as much time.

I realize there are people with young kids or 2-3 jobs that really have little to no downtime, but it seems that for most people time isn't really the issue - it's just are you more of a passive or active type of personality.

Hobbies are kind of by definition wastes of time. That's what makes them different than work.

If you only want to learn programming for work then you obviously have a different perspective than people writing chess engines from scratch for fun instead of using an existing one, right?

> I don’t understand the world of people who have this degree of free time

You dont understand that people have hobbies they enjoy doing? Because thats the entire point of the article.