John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930 that nobody will “look forward to the age of leisure and abundance without a dread” ([1930] 1963: 358). To a great extent we now live in that “dreaded” age. However, the age of abundance and the age of leisure have not been realized to an equal extent: abundance has increased far more than leisure.

Productivity levels increased significantly after the Second World War: in fact, they more than doubled. In principle that means that we could have the same standard of living as people fifty years ago, but only work half as much as the average worker back then. The point is, if you are satisfied with a given material standard of living, never wanting to raise it above that level, the increase in productivity will provide you with more and more time for leisure. But rather than exploiting the increase in productivity for more leisure, we have chosen to raise our standard of living, becoming – seen from the perspective of earlier societies – ridiculously affluent. The average reader of this book is better off in terms of material wealth than more than 99 per cent of the people who have ever lived. Most kings and queens of earlier days would be envious of your level of material wealth. Of course, it will not seem like that for you in your everyday life, but that is simply because you take this standard of living for granted.