[rland12]

I think about this a lot.

People 100 years ago, if they teleported to today, would look at our lives, our possessions, the conveniences offered to us every single day by all of this increased productivity... They would probably wonder why we don't cut the hours we've worked by half or more. I don't quite understand it myself. Why does all of the time we've gained go to working, when it seems to me the cost of a "whole lifetime" has gone down by so much in the past 50 years.

Machines seem to already do most of the work necessary for a human life for us.

[Fricken]

Karl Marx anticipated the machines would allow us to live lives comprised largely of leisure by now, but here we are all working. The thing is, if we were content with middle class living standards of the 19th century we'd be working a whole lot less. So when it becomes possible to do something crazy like build out an asteroid mining industrial complex, or something, will we say 'ahh, we don't need to do that, let's put our feet up', do you think we'll take it easy or will we keep working? I think we'll keep working.

[DonaldFisk]

Not just Marx: John Maynard Keynes thought we'd be on a 15 hour week: http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

[Godel_unicode]

You might be interested in reading about the hedonistic treadmill, if you haven't already heard of it. Effectively, good things don't make us very happy for very long before we need more.

[projektir]

The hedonistic treadmill is someone's hypothesis. I am very skeptical that it is actually correct, as working around it seems fairly simple (certain video games are a good example).

I would rather we didn't base major social attitudes on someone being convinced that a normal, healthy human wouldn't be able to make themselves happy.

[kelnos]

A sibling poster covered this, but a maybe-not-terrible analogy occurred to me: it's like writing software. Even when you've finished building out all the features you want to build, it's still never done. There might be bugs that need to be fixed, or you might want to make some slow parts of the code more efficient, or users have come up with some new use cases that require you to add new features. It just never ends. It's rare to find a software project that's "done", aside from abandoned projects.

I guess people are just never satisfied with some kind of end state. And I guess that's a good thing; life is pretty good these days (if you're reasonably well off in a developed country), but, well... we still don't have our jet packs or hoverboards or flying cars. All progress depends on people not being satisfied with the status quo.

[imtringued]

The benefits are captured by spending more on exclusionary rivalrous goods like land, education and healthcare.