I don't agree that high productivity is the price of leisure. If that were the case, when do we get to cash that check? We've achieved record levels of productivity, so when do we get record levels of leisure?
I'm writing this as an American workaholic. So I'm in it as much as anybody. I'm just getting old and starting to ask a lot of questions. :)
"The children have inherited a world their ancestors could only dream of. A more equitable and luxurious existence. But the problems of the past have widely been forgotten, and their solutions have brought about new classes of problems."
Going to take America for example, since that is the culture I grew up in.
Children don't work in factories or sweep chimneys anymore. Childhood is now free of labor. School is broken but conflating that gulag with labor isn't fair.
Prime working age is 18-65. Mid-to-late 20's with extra school. Compare that to a few hundred years ago and 50% of humans were dead before the age of 5, and 50% of the ones who survived that were dead by 30. You lived to work and you worked until you died.
The amount of time we spend on food prep, house hold maintenance, etc. is down significantly. The "hours worked per unit X" for consumption is down substantially, meaning you work less to accumulate the same standard of living compared to 100 years ago. The 40 hour work week is also relatively novel.
Life generally sucked for our ancestors. Our world is a utopia in contrast and we take it for granted.
From video games, to TV, to art, to resteraunts, to climate control, etc. Luxury is everywhere. Luxury is more abundant. We just moved the goal posts.
Not really, most people who survived childhood would easily live to 60/70
"Excluding child mortality, the average life expectancy during the 12th–19th centuries was approximately 55 years...if a person survived childhood, they had about a 50% chance of living 50–55 years, instead of only 25–40 years" [1][a].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
[a] http://sirguillaume.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Old_Age-H...
We have far more leisure time than our parents did, and way more than our grandparents. Our kids will have far more leisure time than us.
It's hard to compare in part because there are very different lifestyles. As a member of the fortunate "programmer class" I have high pay, health insurance, easy job portability. This leads to pretty reasonable vacation schedules, good lifespan. Overwork expectations and stress are the downsides, but these are within my control somewhat and I can just get another job.
This research paper says leisure time increased noticeably from 1965 to 2003 - an increase of 6-8 hours per week for men and 4-8 for women. https://www.nber.org/papers/w12082. This is a surprise to me and goes against my intuition. Maybe we always feel like we are getting a bad deal.
Don't forget the sizable number of lower hourly wage Americans where some people work many hours at low pay and barely support themselves. Americans seem to work significantly more than our European peers https://20somethingfinance.com/american-hours-worked-product....
I dunno. When my parents got home from work, they were done with work except for rare exceptions.
Now a lot of people have to deal with working with technology that is supposed to have 100% uptime but of course that never happens so random freakout fix something. And even if you don't work directly in tech, everyone wants to be able to get ahold of you because nothing can possibly wait. We deal with things around the world timezones way more than in the past so that just increases the chance that someone needs to get ahold of you because something in another country where it's the work hours need something.
So I'm not really sure about your theory that we have more leisure time.. maybe(?) we have a little more time, but it's certainly not true disconnecting. I can't go on vacation without having to worry I will have to work or check in on things. Even it's only a little bit, it's still there.
Having leisure time isn't new to our generation (any of them).
