The world is full of bullshit jobs and bullshit tasks that are unproductive. The next button sending that email for you will balloon the growing pile of bullshit, but look like productivity to passive analysis. So yes our lifestyles have improved, but our work on bullshit is not responsible for those improvements.
I recently worked for a company that I ultimately realized by the time I was leaving that the whole thing was a BS job. I was doing real, good work, but the entire org was so dysfunctional that the project was doomed to failure. And I'm not entirely sure that ultimately this wasn't known somehow from the top; idk, I really feel like the CIO who was running it had some significant problems, she did a lot of magical thinking/was delusional.
Wow, this exactly describes my work in a dysfunctional startup. We set impossible time goals and don't make them. We are making progress on our software project. The goal of this is a faster something, but our only demonstrated and tested scenarios were extremely optimized by us. I don't see us actually being useful in general cases. In such a situation, I am just trying to hang on until my options vest and then move on.