Every generation looks at technological progress and predicts the obvious conclusion, that people will have more leisure time. It’s easy to see that what you ar

Every generation looks at technological progress and predicts the obvious conclusion, that people will have more leisure time. It’s easy to see that what you are doing now will be easier and quicker. They don’t see the new things that people will be doing, new social structures to adapt and compete in, new information to process, and especially the cognitive burden of managing risk in so many new choices. The simplest example that we can relate to may be email. Before email, writing letters was awful. You got out a nice pen and paper and whiteout, and carefully wrote in your best penmanship a few pages to your grandmother thanking her for a nice new pair of socks. You did this twice a year. Now we have email, and the whole family sends low-effort messages and photos every day. Nobody would have guessed that this was any sort of need, but you do need to do it because family inclusion and affection is now competitive and that is a basic need. Almost nothing we are spending our time on right now would be considered a need even 50 years ago, but most of it is spent trying to satisfy a need that was easy for them. Much of that is spent “working”, which is mostly now just wasted time and miserable interactions under artificial stress and unending hours. That makes people feel awful, and ruins any leisure time they might have had. Any by the way, some people here are saying that rich people have leisure on the backs of the working class. Just look at their families. They’re not healthy, nor happy. They are scared to death in every moment of losing everything, and they can’t trust anybody. Don’t envy them. It may look like leisure but it doesn’t feel like it.