Why is free time still so elusive? (theconversation.com)

because whenever productivity increases as do expectations. so it's a race with no end and salaries don't keep up. That's how CEOs line up their pockets with 100s of billions.

You can have a lot of freetime if you optimize for it by living like a monk on a software engineer salary. However its not an attractive lifestyle so say goodbye to partners and children.

With the modern attention economy, people having free time means money is left on the table still.

You don't work hard to have a good life, you do it to have a better life than the one yesterday and the day before that. That's just how we define success as a society. An average American from the 1950s was already living better than a king from a few hundred years ago, but we still continued to work and continued to move our civilization forward. That's not a bad thing.

The assumption was that work weeks would get shorter (15 hours / week), but perhaps it is more that careers can be shorter (work for a decade and then retire). Read: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/09/15/a-brief-history-o...