It makes me think of how unfortunate it is that the 40-hour work week became so entrenched that it's considered a minimum, and many places "expect" their employees invest even larger proportions of their lives working on someone else's lives. Makes you wonder what people could accomplish if we could live more like Buckminster Fuller's ideals:
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
What if make-work and consumption are inextricably connected? Retail therapy, Internet, and TV act as a release valve offering easy rewards, while an ever-ascending-and-more-difficult ladder exists for the more ambitious.
Meanwhile, culture modifies itself to reward consumption ("buy the expensive [read:right] things!") and ambition ("become powerful so you can buy the shiny things!"). I do believe we need to be productive, of course.
This reminds me of "The War of Art" by Steven Pressfield. One of the main thrusts is that if you are serious about your art -- whatever it might be -- you should treat it like your profession. Do your (creative) work every day, and make some progress, however small, every day. Whether you feel like it or not. Make your art your day job, and your old day job your side gig. Even if the change is just mental at first.
“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”