| > In my experience, even the poorest of the poor get [stuff] Stuff costs. For every advantage a person receives, someone above them will leverage it for their own benefit. Increased productivity from automation does not flow toward fewer hours for the same pay but to increased output for the same pay - or perhaps to less pay when forced out of their career. Vaccine-lengthened lives are spent working more years to survive, typically at less than ideal jobs. The gadgets you tick off (in context that infers they a measure life improvement) come with costs. Where time is saved, expectations are increased to fill that time. This trend has led us to a state where ordinary lives are massively more complex. Routine events have many more steps and requirements. Gadgets themselves are conduits for rent-seeking exploitation, which requires still more resources from a finite pool. Predictably, society has a growing need for mental health services. Some areas have services for those who are overtaxed and without resources. Many areas do not - despite widespread signaling that mental health services universally available. However, I can agree that the advantages you mention are serving to get us where we are. |
For example, my mother still remembers how it was to do laundry before washing mashines. Washing sheets generally took most of the day and was filled with manual labor. That's how women spend every third or fourth Sunday back then (had to be Sunday, because they were working in a job on the other six days of the week), before they could finally afford a washing machine.