And this includes the programming whiz kids who are in such demand in this economy. You have to wonder how much of life they give up to "achieve" what they have.
Perhaps you'd prefer horse carriage delivered snail mail forums instead of the instant collaboration forum we are typing on?
Perhaps you'd prefer to adopt the lifestyle of the
Amish Paradise.
So you cook with firewood and wash your butthole with dirt after taking a shit?
One of the signs of being too old is when you think everything was just about perfectly balanced in your generation but now everything has gone to hell.
Do you think it was similarly fair to criticize the engineers who created the first refrigerator.
There's no need to "sacrifice" economic growth. The Italian Renaissance showed that it was possible to have great progress with totally free money and credit. We would probably still get where we are, but not as quickly as we have.
If we keep arguing whether it's desirable to have better technology vs. better mental health and environment, we'll probably never finish, as we'd be comparing apples and oranges. More clarity would probably be provided by a moral perspective in this case. The modern system basically allows theft by the elites --it's only a side effect of this theft, ie the need to stabilize the system given this theft, that we have such fast economic growth. A system that is built from moral dissonance at its core can IMO be viewed as something that will come back to haunt us, sooner or later.