In Praise of Idleness, by Bertrand Russell (opens in new tab)

Please also read accounts of people who wrote about the ordinary people's living and working conditions at the same time, such as George Orwell's Wigam Pier, many essays or Down and out in Paris and London, and you'd be amazed at how far better we live now.

Compared to that time (1920s, 1930s), people today (in the developed world) really DO NOT have to work so hard and the surplus is huge.

We have the surplus the philosophers theorized, but not the humanism to make beneficial use of it. When was the last time you went to the store to buy a shirt and they were out of shirts? The same applies for microchips and cars-- there is an unlimited quantity of these goods as far as the individual is concerned. The next major (albeit likely very gradual) revolution in human society will be of more equitable resource distribution which embraces (rather than grudgingly admits) the prospect of universal high standard of living.

The philosophers never realized that largely it is the inertia of a society that determines its prospects and outcomes in spite of technological advancements which might threaten to change the way of things.

I think the main thing is that we aren't good at distributing the gains of this increased productivity, nor are we good at training people with the skills necessary to maintain the productivity.

The result is that the few people who do meaningfully contribute are tremendously overworked. They may make a lot of money but have no time to enjoy it, since they feel like they can never take a vacation or the whole thing will come tumbling down. Meanwhile, the rest of society is either languishing in poverty and unemployment or have to take soul-crushing, make-work jobs in order to justify someone giving them a paycheck.

There are 2 main reasons for this. One is the erosion of the welfare state, and we can see this in our return to gilded-age levels of inequality, and the other is our relentless desire for stuff (materialism).

It's like middle-aged disillusionment combined with the 5 stages of loss, writ cultural.

I guess we're at stage 3 : Contriving a story that we can swallow. A story that will make us feel better about our fucked up machine-drone lives.

We're working on that story every day all day. You can see it on tv. Thrashing like a dog with its leg in a trap.

I think advances in cultural norms improve more slowly than advances in technology. Also if you are a policymaker who discourages productivity, then that is equivalent to discouraging economic growth. Even if it would increase the well being of workers, it's controversial to be anti-growth.