Instead of choosing to work less and live a life of leisure, freedom and the pursuit of happiness, we kept working at the same or an increasing rate to make more money, or rather, those who own(ed) the capital and technology that makes it so did.
It’s a bit of a pithy answer in an online comment but I genuinely believe humanity as a whole would be happier with less if it meant we got to live life on our own terms by default. Ever growing consumption way past the point of necessity comes with a host of problems (power and wealth imbalance, climate change, destruction of nature, etc) but by far the biggest one is the sheer waste of our few laps around the sun.
I think this is easily represented by the fact that technology keeps improving, things get automated but somehow we are still working the same, if not more.
You are not owed a damn thing, the universe is a cold, uncaring bitch.
That said, we humans are nothing if not an ingenious bunch. We’ve come up with all sorts of ways to work more efficiently. The amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it
Instead of choosing to work less and live a life of leisure, freedom and the pursuit of happiness, we kept working at the same or an increasing rate to make more money, or rather, those who own(ed) the capital and technology that makes it so did.
It’s a bit of a pithy answer in an online comment but I genuinely believe humanity as a whole would be happier with less if it meant we got to live life on our own terms by default. Ever growing consumption way past the point of necessity comes with a host of problems (power and wealth imbalance, climate change, destruction of nature, etc) but by far the biggest one is the sheer waste of our few laps around the sun.
I think this is easily represented by the fact that technology keeps improving, things get automated but somehow we are still working the same, if not more.
Thanks for the summary.