What happened to the promise of leisure (and pleasure)?

The promise of technology and industrialisation was... more time and convenience for culture and the individual. So what went wrong, because we now have less time, more pressure and more debt?

We are in every respect just like the dog chasing its tail. The faster we run, the more dizzy we get and our tail, the anticipation of leisure and reward, remains just as far away as it's always been, if not further -- If we apply the quantum theory that the faster we go the smaller we get, resulting in the distance from nose to end of tail growing.

Back on track. The problem is twofold, mindset and systems.

Mindset
The mindset of growth converts every opportunity [of more time] not into the opportunity for greater leisure, but rather the opportunity to do even more, so we can make more, buy more, have more. The false promise that more is somehow better, even when most of the more is completely and utterly unnecessary, and adds nothing to our quality of life, cultural development or physical comfort.

In fact it could easily be argued that it's hurting us now and mortgaging the future.

Systems
The other is the systems of which the money or financial systems is the biggest culprit. The vast bulk of our money is created through the mechanism of debt creation (home, business and government loans), and attached to debt is interest. The interest however, is never created. And so trapped in this false scarcity, we are compelled to produce more to firstly stay ahead of the debt payments, and secondly to service the interest on that debt (which was never created)

The only solution to this quandary is constant economic growth. And even a child can reason that constant growth within a finite context is destined to fail.

So even if there was a sudden planetary mindset shift from the idea that exponential growth equals progress, which it may have been many decades ago, but now is actually counter progress, to a steady state equals progress. We would still find ourselves trapped in the traditional money narrative of chasing debt and the interest [never created] on debt.

It's a bit like using one credit card to pay another. It's an ill conceived plan ultimately destined to fail.

And as complex as it may seem, and it can get a little tricky, both mindset and human systems can be changed. Mindset can be mastered and moulded, the ideas and narratives which govern our behaviour and the systems can be transformed. And we can change the narratives of the existing systems, the values and principles on which they are build.

The point here is that money and the systems governing is creation, distribution and final dissolution (required in a debt based system) are all the creations of our minds and mindsets. We can change them. Money is not a real thing like trees and tractor tyres. It's an idea of how we should go about exchanging value (our gifts) and keeping score.

It is as illusionary as Celsius or meters.

The challenge comes in when we try to change the systems without first having changed our mindset. The money system is a product of mindset and it has been a powerful instrument in human development, but now the cause of looming catastrophe and untold misery. But to change it, we need to master a new level of enlightened mindset, with which to design and experiment with other more relevant narratives and systems of money.

It we simply tear it down, we can only ever replace it with another variation of the system which we have just gotten rid of.

Mindset mastery or transformation alone is not enough, but playing and redesigning systems from within the very mindset (values and beliefs) which originally developed them, is... well pointless.