This is a late stage capitalism phenomenon. You couldn’t say this 1000 years ago when everyone worked the land so we had enough food to survive or 200 years ago

This is a late stage capitalism phenomenon. You couldn’t say this 1000 years ago when everyone worked the land so we had enough food to survive or 200 years ago before the Industrial Revolution. We are living in psychedelic times because the useful jobs (food, housing, consumer goods) have been industrialised to a point that a low percentage of the human population (10%?) can provide for the entirety of the other 90%. Under normal circumstances you might say we have a distributive problem. But instead of opening that conversation we’ve maintained a now increasingly less useful economic system (it was useful for increasing the productivity of physical goods, but it’s not doing a good job with the post-materialist economy) and we say “automation does not destroy jobs” only because we’ve built fragile post industrial economies where there are lawyers and baristas (having lived in the UK this was one extreme post-industrial economy). Effectively - we’ve automated meaningful labour so that the remaining labour is not meaningful. But because the current economic system insists you “have to have a job” then we keep making what David Graeber nicknamed bullshit jobs. However this process does not solve climate change, poverty, crime, etc. Instead of accepting and adopting the post-scarcity post-industrial world, we’ve molded it to our expectations of a capitalist society. Thus lies the origin of your impressions and the seeds of all our troubles.