what is the definition of productive? In 1985 I had a one month $1200 phone bill (well, the bill was to my dad) from calling my girlfriend on the other side of

what is the definition of productive? In 1985 I had a one month $1200 phone bill (well, the bill was to my dad) from calling my girlfriend on the other side of the country. I wrote letters to her on paper and sent them via snail mail. Today I video chat and play network games with my friend's 7yr old son 8000 kilometers away. In that same time I had an Atari 1200XL and it took several minutes to run the assembler to cross compile the C64 game I was working on. Today I can do far more impressive things from any browser just using jsfiddle/codepen and things run instantly. Today I can make music in Garageband, Ableton, and all the alternatives in minutes. In the mid 80s my dad had to use a 4 track reel-to-reel with overdub and he had to be able to actually play all the instruments. Today I can grab blender/resolve/fusion and compete with almost any TV show on quality and broadcast my stuff for free on youtube. Vs in the 80s/90s when that would have taking a huge team of people and $$$$$$$$ in equipment plus access to either retail and VHS copies or access to broadcast gate keepers. Unreal/Unity have vastly increased productivity in games. Just go to any gamejam and look at how far people used to their tools can get in 2 days vs what they could make in the same amount of time in the mid-80s. Or look at the explosion of games on places like itch.io. Even typing documents. Typing in this textarea in HN is way easier than typing was on my Atari 800 in Atariwriter and the moment I press "add comment" it's published for all to see. Same with twitter/facebook/google docs/blogger/wordpress. Consider how much work and how many people it would have taking to do anything similar in the 80s. Write document, typeset document, get printer to print 1000s of copies, mail them to people, have mail people carry and deliver them.... Contacting people in general and being able to send them documents, photos, videos, is free and trival today. Would have taken 10s of people and days to weeks just 40 yrs ago. Maybe "jobs" in general have not but lots of things have gotten incredibly easy, raising what is possible to produce (in otherwords, be productive)