There is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of modern life in the developed world. We live surrounded by a hum of pervasive economic anxiety, a widespread narrative of a possible crisis, and of running faster just to stay in place. Conversations are laced with concerns over the cost of living and the stability of our livelihoods. But this anxiety unfolds against a backdrop of behaviors that suggest a vastly different reality.
To cut through the noise of what we claim to value, we can turn to the economic concept of "revealed preferences." First articulated by Paul Samuelson, this theory suggests that actions - not words - are the most reliable data. It argues that the true priorities of a society are revealed by how its members allocate their most finite resource: time. We each possess the same "time budget" - twenty-four hours per day. If the struggle for basic subsistence - food, shelter, security - were truly the dominant economic problem for the majority, our statistical behavior would rationally reflect that. We would see a culture where available discretionary time is poured back into enhancing that security: working additional hours, repairing the home, or acquiring practical skills.
The behavioral data, however, paints a starkly different picture. The average person in a developed nation now dedicates over six and a half hours each day to internet-connected activities. This is not time spent securing the necessities of life. Across Europe, the average adult spends 2 hours and 10 minutes per day on social media platforms; in North America, that figure is 2 hours and 13 minutes [1]. To this, we must add the time spent streaming television and films, a figure that now globally averages over 3 hours and 13 minutes daily [2].
These are not the actions of a society teetering on the brink of material collapse, but neither are they necessarily the actions of a society at rest.
It is tempting to view this massive digital consumption as a symptom of exhaustion - a numb collapse into the screen by a workforce too drained for anything else. But this 'fatigue hypothesis' grants too much agency to the user and too little to the platform. It ignores the asymmetric reality of addiction engineering. We do not simply 'fall' into our screens out of tiredness; we are pulled into them by an algorithmic infrastructure designed to override volition. To attribute six hours of daily screen time to simple mental exhaustion is to underestimate the scale of the investment in behavioral modification.
This colossal allocation of trillions of human-hours annually is not just a flight into passive entertainment or scrolling; it is a mass migration into a new, digital arena of competition. A significant portion of this time is dedicated to high-stakes engagement: online gambling, competitive gaming, and the relentless, exhausting work of managing social status and digital reputation. We are not seeing a species relaxing in abundance; we are seeing a species that has pivoted from a struggle for material survival to a competition for social significance. The fact that the primary battleground for millions has shifted from the field to the feed is the strongest evidence that we have functionally crossed the threshold into a post-scarcity economy - one defined not by the absence of struggle, but by the dematerialization of it.
Time-use surveys from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reveal a world that has functionally solved the problem of production and is now experimenting with different cultural answers to the question, "What do we do now?" [3]. The data shows that the average time spent on paid work in Japan, for example, is approximately 5.5 hours per day. In France, that number is radically lower, at less than 3 hours per day. The French, in turn, allocate their time surplus differently, dedicating, on average, approximately 2 hours per day simply to the leisure of eating [4]. These are not different economic realities; they are different cultural choices made possible by the same underlying condition of functional abundance.
This behavioral evidence points to a new economic baseline. The multi-trillion-dollar "attention economy" is perhaps the single greatest macroeconomic evidence of this [5]. This industry, with corporate valuations that dwarf the GDP of many nations [6], is predicated on capturing a single asset: discretionary human attention. This attention is, by definition, the cognitive and temporal capacity available after an individual has met their survival needs. For any industry to reach this scale, its primary audience must be available in vast and predictable quantities. The very existence of this economic behemoth, therefore, is a direct, market-based confirmation that billions of people possess a "time surplus." It is an economy built entirely upon the leisure that material abundance provides.
If our behavior demonstrates this functional abundance, why does the feeling of scarcity persist? This is the central paradox. We have achieved the economic ends imagined by 20th-century thinkers, but we remain trapped in the psychological and structural means they devised to get us here.
In 1930, writing in the depths of the Great Depression, the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote a short, optimistic essay titled, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren". Looking ahead a century, he predicted that the forces of technological progress and capital accumulation would solve what he called "the economic problem"—the age-old human struggle for subsistence.
On this front, his prediction was remarkably accurate. The period he was writing about is our own, and the industrialized world has delivered on his forecast. Since 1930, developed nations have seen their Gross Domestic Product increase by 4 to 8 times, achieving a standard of living that would have been unimaginable to his contemporaries [7].
Where Keynes erred was in his sociological prediction. He believed that, liberated from the need to work for survival, humanity would gratefully embrace a 15-hour workweek. We would dedicate ourselves to the "art of leisure," learning to live "wisely and agreeably and well". This leisure dividend never arrived. We still work, and for many, the hours are long and the anxiety is high.
The reasons for this are threefold. First, as analyzed by Robert and Edward Skidelsky, Keynes correctly identified that our absolute needs—those we feel regardless of others, like food and shelter—are finite and can be satisfied. But he overlooked the power of our relative needs—the desires we feel only because their satisfaction "lifts us above... our fellows". This drive for status, the insatiable human desire for social comparison, prevents us from ever feeling we have "enough."
The second reason is psychological: the vertigo of freedom. We are victims of what psychologist Barry Schwartz calls the "Paradox of Choice". In a pre-modern world, the range of possible actions for an individual was constrained by tradition, class, and geography. Today, the horizon of "possible lives" is effectively infinite. We can watch any movie, travel to any country, or learn any skill. But while our options have exploded, our time remains fixed. This creates a crushing Opportunity Cost of Time. As the sociologist Hartmut Rosa argues in his theory of "Social Acceleration," modern time scarcity is not a result of having too little time, but of the widening gap between the "world of possibilities" (which grows with technology) and the "world of actualization" (which remains bound by our biological lifespan). Every choice we make now carries the heavy weight of a thousand unchosen alternatives, creating a phantom sensation of loss that haunts even our leisure.[8][9]
The third reason is structural. This drive for status and novelty was harnessed to keep the 20th-century economic engine running long after its original purpose was complete. This has led to a fundamental shift in the nature of work itself. The long-term trend in all developed economies has been a massive structural shift in employment, away from agriculture and manufacturing and into a vast, nebulous category called "services" [10]. This sector, which now accounts for the majority of all employment globally, contains both socially vital jobs - nurses, teachers, sanitation workers - and a sprawling administrative superstructure.
This superstructure is often dismissed as "bullshit," but its origins are rooted in hard economic reality: the structural transformation of the economy. As automation drove the cost of manufacturing toward zero, labor was forced to migrate from high-productivity "making" sectors into low-productivity "service" sectors—a phenomenon known as Baumol's Cost Disease.
Unlike a factory, where technology allows one worker to produce ten times more widgets, service roles—like nursing, education, or corporate management—resist such multiplication. You cannot "automate" a meeting or "optimize" a relationship without degrading its quality. The result is administrative bloat: we haven't simply invented useless work; we have moved our workforce into the one sector where "efficiency" is structurally impossible.[9] This creates the feeling of pointlessness—not because the coordination isn't necessary, but because it lacks the tangible, compounding output of the industrial age.
This phenomenon is not an economic failure; it is a logical component for keeping the 20th-century growth model running. That model was based on a simple loop: people work for an income, then use that income to consume what is produced. Technological progress broke that loop by making it possible to produce all necessities with a fraction of the workforce. The system faced a choice: distribute the gains as leisure (Keynes's 15-hour week) or find a way to keep the loop going.