[chongli]

I don’t think it’s that simple. Productivity gains are rarely universal. Much of the past century’s worth of advancement into automation and computing technology has generated enormous productivity gains in manufacturing, communication, and finance industries but had little or no benefit for a lot of human capital-intensive sectors such as service and education.

It still takes basically the same amount of labour hours to give a haircut today as it did in the late 19th century. An elementary school teacher today can still not handle more than a few tens up to maybe a hundred students at the extreme limit. Yet the hairdressing and education industries must still compete — on the labour market — with the industries showing the largest productivity gains. This has the effect of raising wages in these productivity-stagnant industries and increasing the cost of these services for everyone, driving inflation.

Inflation is the real time-killer, not a fear of idleness. The cost of living has gone up for everyone — rather dramatically, in nominal terms — without even taking housing costs into account.

[_heimdall]

Productivity gains aren't universal, agreed there for sure, though we have long since moved past needing to optimize productivity for the basics. Collectively we're addicted to trading our time and effort for gadgets, convenience, and status symbols.

I'm not saying those are bad things, people can do whatever they want with their own time and effort. It just seems obvious to me that we aren't interested in working less over any meaningful period of time, if that was a goal we could have reached it a long time ago by defining a lower bar for when we have "enough."