The Abundance–Bullshit Paradox
Why We Work When We Don’t Have To
"The love of money as a possession… will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity.”
—John Maynard Keynes, 1930
A thought has been gnawing at me: we fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem.
Let me elaborate…
Just weeks ago, a provocative question I posed on LinkedIn ignited a cascade of thoughtful discussions, spilling over into private messages. This led me down a rabbit hole of fascinating essays, which I couldn't help but compare with the lived experience of my grandmother.
A Life of Work, Without Pretence
My grandmother was a force of nature who never truly ceased working. Even after retirement, when most would embrace repose, she leaned further into life. She became a nurse for her community: administering injections, chauffeuring neighbors to hospital appointments, and steadfastly sitting by their bedsides through years of illness. This quiet vocation she pursued with tireless energy, still driving patients at ninety-six (much to her family’s desperate pleas for her to stop!). Only in March, when illness finally claimed her, did her service come to its natural close. She passed away in June.
At her funeral, over a hundred souls gathered: family, of course, but also friends, patients, and the community she had devoted decades to serving. They came to honour a life undeniably defined by care. She was not “productive” in the contemporary economic sense—she barely managed to send a text message on her trusty brick phone—yet her impact on countless lives was immeasurable.
This is one model of work: deeply lived, profoundly dignified, utterly indispensable.
Contrast it with the prevailing culture of modern employment: the endless revisions of slide decks that vanish after thirty seconds in a meeting, the meticulous crafting of reports never truly read but meticulously filed as proof of diligence, the elaborate rituals of busyness whose primary purpose seems to be signaling one’s continued participation in the game. The chasm between my grandmother’s purposeful existence and this sterile environment is not merely generational. It reveals a profound structural paradox at the heart of modern economies.
A Promise Made to Our Grandparents
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes famously envisioned a future where his grandchildren would work a mere fifteen hours a week. He believed that technology, relentlessly multiplying productivity, would banish scarcity. The fundamental challenge, he predicted, would shift from survival to the purposeful use of abundant leisure (“the art of life”).
He was, in part, correct. Productivity has indeed soared. Yet, the workweek stubbornly hovers near forty hours. The promised dividend of abundance has not materialized as freedom, but has instead been absorbed into new, often meaningless, layers of activity.
Keynes wrote amidst the Great Depression, a world gripped by unemployment and pervasive anxiety. Yet, he offered a vision almost shocking in its optimism:
Within a century, relentless technological progress and the magic of compound interest would definitively solve the “economic problem” of scarcity. Humanity would work a mere 15 hours a week. The vast remainder of their time would be liberated for what he so eloquently termed the “art of life.”
I cannot help but ponder: Why, in an era of unprecedented plenty, do we still cling so fiercely to the rigid structures of full-time toil?
