There may be some who disgree with your view, but let's assume most people want the 'ultimate' goal of being 'liberated' from work in order to 'live more'.

However, that's a wildly simplistic view of things.

You can't just say this without realizing that there are severe drawbacks to this. We can't just all work 4h instead of 8h and expect to maintain our standards of living, all the benefits of our times, maintain scientific progress, maintain national security and many, many others.

The ultimate goal should maybe be productivity, and if 4h is better than 8h for whatever reason, then let's do that. But it's definitely not so simple.

> We can't just all work 4h instead of 8h and expect to maintain our standards of living

Do you really think we are using our resources and technology efficiently? Because that’s the implication here. I think that’s frankly absurd.

Absolutely not. Do you think we’d use resources more effectively by cutting our hours?

Maybe the global maxima is not the standard 9-5 work day, that’s almost a given, but to claim that working dramatically less will yield better results is absurd.

I somewhat agree with you, but if anything, the pandemic has highlighted that people need purpose, else they while away their time and do unproductive stuff. They don't pursue their passions and become a maker or artist or artisan, no, they get on TikTok or some MMORPG or whatever strikes their LARPing fancy. Very few take the opportunity to "cultivate' themselves.

If I have no passion to be a marker or an artist or an artisan, is any luxury time I have wasted because I'm not 'cultivating' myself? Isn't that what I get to decide? Also, can we considering the middle of a pandemic a valid test case? We were all told to stay home - most people weren't about to go take a pottery class.

If you give a starving person a three-star michelin dinner, I don't think they would appreciate it properly. You need to be well-fed to appreciate the subtlety and the beauty of the meal. Similarly, people who don't have much free time may waste what little free time they get -- only when they have enough might they be able to figure out how to "properly" enjoy it.

Cynically, people don't want to be liberated, people want to be better than the neighbor they don't like, to have what they have, and to have what they don't have, and that gets them through day to day