"Back in 1930, Keynes predicted that the working week would be drastically cut, to perhaps 15 hours a week, with people choosing to have far more leisure as their material needs were satisfied."
However that's so not the case of today, is it? We work from Monday to Friday still, and even more over time working, it's not rare to see in the news that some young talent worked to their death at desk.
How come? We have achieved way greater economy size and material richness, how come we didn't realize the prediction of Keynes and still work so much that we literally work ourselves to death?
Essentially it is because of our human nature.
Wait... isn't human nature pursuing leisurely life? If nobody tells you to, you probably wouldn't go to work, if it's not that you have to feed your family, you probably just want to lay on sofa and watch TV all day long?
Yes, it is true that we have the laziness in our nature. But there's another side of our nature that can easily be ignored, that is the pursuing of higher level enjoyment and mental satisfaction.
Speaking of higher level enjoyment, we surely can feed ourselves well if everybody just work 2-3 days a week to earn the necessities and never worry about other things. But it isn't what our world looks like. We feed ourselves well, then we would come up with new ideas, new goals, new ambitions, we would try new things, invent new things, create new things, all of these cost times and effort. Getting fed well is never human's main goal, we want to feed ourselves not only food, but also tastes, exoticism, superiority, luxury... and greed drives us to create more temptation for others while we are tempted by something else, we want more money, accumulate more wealth, so we create stuff we didn't have to own. One shirt is enough to cover your body in summer, but people don't just have one shirt in their closet, that's because they have higher level of demand than just covering themselves. That demand, is the source of endless labor of human beings. One guy created something really appealing, he sets a high price, the others then must work more to get that piece of new item, and in this way our standard of living has been constantly lift higher and higher as economy grows. That's why we will NEVER reach a stage where we'll work significantly less hours than today we do as a whole.
Secondly, there's the psychological thing playing trick on us, we want to be better, not just better than where we were 100 years ago, but better than our peers, as a lawyer, I must make more money than other lawyers, a doctor, I want to be more successful than other doctors... this kind of competition is another main engine drives us working endlessly harder and harder. We are all like the rabbit with a carrot hanging in front of our face, keep chasing, but never reach it. The bigger the carrot is, the faster and more "tiredlessly" we chase after it. Rich people might choose working over enjoying leisure since their pay per hour is so high that they may even consider having some time off isn't worth it.
And it is fun to do so, it is fun to pursue, to compete, to leave the past far behind, to explore more seeming unlikely and impossible areas. That's human nature, you can point it out, but you can't say, "it's bad", because that's what drives us forward, that's why we human are different from animals, a soul never gets enough of what he has, a soul never gets tired of pursuing.
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