Why We Still Work So Much
We were supposed to be working less by now.
Nearly a century ago, the greatest economist of the twentieth century, John Maynard Keynes, predicted that technological progress would dramatically raise our standard of living, while reducing the workweek to no more than fifteen hours.
It seemed a reasonable assumption. Productivity was rising, machines were replacing human effort, and each generation was producing more with less. Keynes believed that, in the future, humanity’s greatest challenge would be to navigate what he called a “sea of spare time.”
He was not alone. A century earlier, the American Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin, had imagined a world where four hours of work a day would be enough. Around the same time, the father of classical liberalism, John Stuart Mill, also suggested that technological progress should be used to reduce work as much as possible and expand the “art of living.”
For a long time, the trend appeared to confirm Keynes’ vision. From the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, working hours gradually declined. Workers fought for time—and they won. The six-day week became five. The ten-hour day became eight. Vacations appeared. Weekends were invented.
Time, slowly, was given back.
Even industrialists began to recognize the limits of endless work. Henry Ford, the pioneer of mass production, discovered that shorter weeks increased productivity. Workers produced more when they worked less. W. K. Kellogg, founder of the Kellogg Company, went further introducing a six-hour workday with remarkable results: fewer accidents, higher efficiency, and real leisure.
Parents had time for their children. People had time to read, to garden, to play. Community life began to flourish again.
For a moment, this future felt inevitable. Work would continue to shrink and leisure would expand. In 1956, Vice President, Richard Nixon, promised that Americans would soon work only four days a week.
The problem, many believed, would not be scarcity, but time. What would people do with all that freedom? How would they fill their days? Entire fields of study emerged around what was called “the problem of leisure.”
The question was no longer how to survive. It was how to live.
And then, quietly, the trend stopped.
Since the 1980s, the reduction of working hours has largely stalled. In some cases, it has reversed. People began working longer hours again. In many countries, full-time work extended beyond forty hours. Availability spread into evenings, weekends, and holidays. Work followed us home. It entered our pockets.
Technology made it possible to work from anywhere. But it also made it difficult to stop. This shift was not only structural, it was cultural. Apple employees wore T-shirts that proudly read: “Working 90 hours a week and loving it.”
This is the paradox: we are more productive than ever before, and yet we are not working less.
Since the mid-twentieth century, productivity has more than doubled. We could produce the same standard of living in a fraction of the time it once required. If we had chosen differently, we could have reduced the working day dramatically. We could have worked four hours a day, six months a year, or taken entire years off.
Instead, we keep working. And most of us rarely stop to ask why.
Part of the answer lies in consumption.
As productivity increased, so did our expectations. We did not use what we gained to buy time, we used it to buy things. More space. More services. More experiences. And more convenience.
A new standard of living emerged, and with it a new necessity to sustain it. We became dependent on our own progress.
Another part of the answer lies in how our societies are structured.
Work is not only how we produce. It is how we earn, how we belong, how we are recognized. Our institutions—from education to social security—are built on the assumption that we will work most of our lives.
To reduce work is not just to make a simple economic change. It is to disrupt the architecture of society itself.
And there is something deeper still.
We have come to see work as virtue. To be busy is to be important. To be overworked is to be needed.
To rest, by contrast, feels like something that must be justified. Not because we cannot afford to stop—but because we no longer know how.
The promise of technology was never just a higher standard of living.
It was freedom.
A reduction in the amount of work was meant to open space for other ways of living—learning, relationships, creativity, community.
For a brief moment, that promise seemed within reach. Then it was quietly set aside. And yet, the possibility remains. The same forces that increased productivity could still be used to reduce the need for work.
The question is no longer whether it is possible, but whether we are willing to choose it. A shift is already visible. Younger generations seem less willing to accept the old assumptions. Millennials were labeled lazy, entitled, unrealistic, and the same accusations are now being directed toward Gen Z.
And yet, what they are questioning is simple:
Why should life revolve around work at all?
We already have the means to work less.
What we lack is the imagination to live beyond work.
