What I always wonder when I read writers’ biographies is how they managed to write anything with the insane number of people they all were constantly meeting. Not only would I have taken my own life with one hundredth of all that socialization but I would have never written a word. Even just reading about all those meetings with all those people freaks me out.
Chatty Writers
Clarissa's Blog 
Those biographies seem minutiae driven. Since you say you’re reading writers’ biographies written before 1980 you have to remember the lack of stimulation they had in comparison to today.
Television had maybe three channels in the US and all of them went off at midnight. Radio didn’t run 24-7 and also had station signoff. If you wanted to procure a record or a book or a newspaper you had to step outside and find a store, which again, most of them were not open 24-7. Depending on the place in the US you lived, many places were closed on Sundays. If you wanted to read all of the books you had to either inherit a library, spend time acquiring one, or go to a public library, if it existed near you. There was no commonly available internet. There were far less people floating around towns of any size than there are now.
Now you can fire up a browser, have 16 tabs open, two word documents open, a keychain full of notes (do you still have that?), music playing, and half binge a Netflix queue, while playing with Klara, slow cooking a roast and having a tv on mute with 200 channels accessible 24-7. You’d have gone to meet people simply because you can’t tat and write at the same time.
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Very good point. I’m glad I wasn’t born back then or I might be reduced to seeking out people, too. The horror.
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Just for the record: Most radio stations were already 24/7 since at least the 1950s.
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In the Soviet Union, radios were set up in such a way that you could never fully turn them off. And so the propaganda could continue coming into your house 24/7.
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In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s commercial radio in the U.S. was mostly top-40 pop music, easy-listening instrumental, and progressive rock
…with a handful of news/sports/talk stations infused between them.
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Considering how possessive and dominating so many relatives and friends can be, yes, how ever DID they manage to find the time and space to even FOCUS on any kind of reflective thought—and, especially, being able to write any of those reflections down?
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