You raise a really good point about how much we are working. People work so much these days, but we clearly don't need it.
This is something that also bothers me. People always frame prosperity/welfare as needing to find a well-paying 9-to-5 job, but is it really necessary for people to work so much? 100 years ago it was common for a single person to support two adults and several children on his own, but now it's common for two parents to work full-time and still feel squeezed. Standards of living have increased, of course, and materialism also plays a big factor, but the whole culture seems wrong. It's probably also due in large part to the government uselessly consuming so much of the economy.
Especially with increasing automation, people are going to have to spend more time on free-form, entrepreneurial sorts of things, and that's
good. There's no need to force people into soul-sucking 9-to-5 jobs. Already, I suspect that if you're earning less than $30k/year in the US, then you could probably make more money by becoming an independent contractor of some sort, even if you're completely unskilled.
I fear that governments will create
near-pointless 9-to-5 jobs as a form of welfare (like eg. the New Deal CCC) in order to guarantee a "living wage", which would be just unbelievably stupid. Just send people a check and the vast majority of them will on their own do much more useful and fulfilling work.
I am totally with you on this. I'm not sure if standards of living would be the right way to put it. I think it's just a culture of of needless consumerism. I remember really an article of a family of 4 that comfortable lives on $25,000 per year (though they make more) compared with a family of 4 where the father is a doctor and the mother is a dentist. I think the latter family was making over $350,000/year. Of course the latter family was also that it just wasn't enough to finish building their million dollar home and pay for their kid's private schools and nannies etc. It's just ridiculous how people don't even think twice to spend more than they earn.
I had another idea that I think may apply well to all this. What if there was just a limit placed on how much you could work to, say 20 hours/week? There would immediately be twice as many jobs available. We could raise wages and focus on increasing productivity. We already produce much more than we need and waste so much.