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 collective 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.
In economics, there is a simple but powerful tool for cutting through the noise of what people say they value: the theory of "revealed preferences." First articulated by Paul Samuelson, the theory holds that our actions are the only reliable data. Our true priorities are revealed not by our words, but by how we "spend" our most finite, non-renewable resource: time. We each possess the same "time budget"—twenty-four hours per day [1]. If the struggle for basic subsistence—food, shelter, security—were truly the dominant economic problem for the majority, our behavior would rationally reflect that. Any available discretionary time would be allocated to enhancing that security: working a second job, repairing the home, or learning a practical, productive skill.
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 [2]. 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 [3].
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. This colossal allocation of trillions of human-hours annually is not merely a flight into passive entertainment; 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, speculative trading, 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 transferred its struggle for survival from the physical realm of calories to the virtual realm of status. 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?" [4]. 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 [5]. 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 [6]. This industry, with corporate valuations that dwarf the GDP of many nations [7], is predicated on harvesting a single raw material: surplus human attention. "Surplus attention" is, by definition, the cognitive and temporal capacity left over after an individual has met their survival needs. For any industry to reach this scale, its primary resource must be available in vast, predictable, and harvestable 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 [8].
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 twofold. 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 structural. This drive for relative status was harnessed to keep the 20th-century economic engine running long after its original purpose was complete. This has led to a profound 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" [9]. 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.
It was this superstructure that the late anthropologist David Graeber identified in his work on "bullshit jobs". These are roles that even the workers themselves recognize as fundamentally pointless, existing purely within the "administrative ether" of the corporate or public sector. While Graeber's own estimates were high, subsequent surveys in European nations like Britain and Holland revealed a startlingly high figure: 37 to 40 percent of all workers were convinced their jobs made no meaningful contribution to the world [10]. Even more conservative academic studies, such as one using data from the American Working Conditions Survey, find that 19% of respondents consider their jobs "rarely" or "never" useful to society [11].
This phenomenon is not an economic failure; it is a logical, if absurd, 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.
Even as far back as 1958, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith diagnosed this issue in his landmark book, The Affluent Society. He observed that post-war, the developed world had solved the ancient problem of production for basic needs, yet remained trapped in an economic mindset—a "conventional wisdom"—forged in an age of poverty. The economy was no longer driven by organic needs like food and shelter, which for most people had been met, but by the artificial creation of new wants. Galbraith termed this the "dependence effect": the process by which "wants are increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied". High-pressure advertising and marketing were no longer just informing consumers of available goods; they were actively manufacturing dissatisfaction to fuel a cycle of perpetual consumption.
This explains the structure of our economy, but it does not fully explain our anxiety. The feeling of precarity is real. We have simply misdiagnosed its source. We are no longer competing for material survival; we are trapped in an exhausting and expensive competition for social status.
The key to this paradox was provided in 1976 by the economist Fred Hirsch in his book, Social Limits to Growth. Hirsch argued that our economy is really two economies operating at once.