We Were Promised Leisure — What Happened?
Once, not too long ago, we imagined a future of 20-hour workweeks, AI doing our chores, and machines giving us the most precious of gifts: time. What went wrong?
We live in an age where technology has never been more powerful, yet the people using it have never been more exhausted.
Instead of leisure, we got burnout.
Instead of freedom, we got gig work.
Instead of rest, we got inboxes, side hustles, and “productivity hacks.”
It wasn’t always supposed to be this way. From Keynes to Kurzweil, prophets of progress imagined that rising productivity would free us from toil. And yet, as our tools became faster, cheaper, and smarter — our calendars filled, our weekends vanished, and the line between work and life dissolved.
The Productivity Paradox
The promise was simple: greater productivity → more output in less time → more leisure.
But in a growth-obsessed economy, productivity doesn’t liberate. It competes.
Every time a task is automated or accelerated, the pressure rises — not to rest, but to do more. More output, more reach, more clients, more margin. Parkinson’s Law kicks in: work expands to fill the time and resources available. We race harder, even as the track gets shorter.
So where did the free time go?
It didn’t vanish — it was repurposed. Turned into surplus value. Captured by platforms. Consumed by always-on expectations. And all the while, we internalized it. We became our own managers, constantly optimizing, rarely resting.
Post-Growth: A Different Promise
The fantasy of infinite growth is unraveling. What replaces it doesn’t have to be scarcity — it could be durability.
A post-growth economy doesn’t mean going without. It means designing things to last.
Imagine products built to be repaired, upgraded, and supported for decades — not dumped and replaced in 18 months. A fridge with a 30-year warranty. A phone with parts you can swap like LEGO. A laptop that gets faster over time, not slower. The “forever product” isn’t a dream — it’s an engineering choice.
This kind of abundance doesn’t rely on endless extraction or exponential growth. It relies on quality.
And when the things we need are built to last, demand stabilizes. The pressure to grow — just to keep up — starts to dissolve. Instead of economies addicted to throughput, we get economies of care, stewardship, and maintenance.
The result? Less waste. More time. More trust. And maybe, just maybe, a world where productivity gains don’t evaporate into platform profits — they compound into collective capacity.
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