I'm not sure it's so much about dealing with hard problems 8h a day, I don't think most people do. But like you say, there's no slack left in the workplace, which makes it ever harder to go into "diffuse" mode thinking. Scrum, standups, email, Slack, open office floor plans and other interruptions of all kind prevents the brain from ever relaxing. Unfortunately, besides just being unhealthy it's also quite unproductive because we need to switch between focused and diffuse modes of thinking many times during a day to effectively solve problems and see the bigger picture.

Honestly, we've solved them, but we've solved them with unsustainable methods.

For example, modern large scale farming is pretty harmful and is destroying top soil and striping soil of important nutrients. But we all like to run around saying, "automated", and it mostly is, but it comes at a cost.

I think that's orthogonal. We could have about the same level of automation with more sustainable farming methods. Planting monocrop fields from horizon to horizon is just a little cheaper.

Oh, I would love to work on hard problems 8h a day. Or with people that do that. Reality is, and basically was since I started my career 15+ years ago, that we have north of 6 h per day in pointless meetings and politics. With some admin work for documentation thrown in for good measure.

With "hard" problems I didn't mean challenging, fun problems to solve. I meant "hard" in a way that there is no simple automation solution to it and it feels "hard".

I understood hard in that way as well.

Not Child, Elder, or Medical care, though

Those things are mostly "easy" in that they're monotonous and no individual task has much risk of failure, but in aggregate it's demanding enough that it's super-hard