because whenever productivity increases as do expectations. so it's a race with no end and salaries don't keep up. That's how CEOs line up their pockets with 100s of billions.

As of yesterday the richest person in the world is Elon Musk, with a total net worth of $205B.

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/?embedded-checkout=tr...

Why not me?

You can have a lot of freetime if you optimize for it by living like a monk on a software engineer salary. However its not an attractive lifestyle so say goodbye to partners and children.

If you live like a monk, why do you need a software engineering salary?

With the modern attention economy, people having free time means money is left on the table still.

You don't work hard to have a good life, you do it to have a better life than the one yesterday and the day before that. That's just how we define success as a society. An average American from the 1950s was already living better than a king from a few hundred years ago, but we still continued to work and continued to move our civilization forward. That's not a bad thing.

> An average American from the 1950s was already living better than a king from a few hundred years ago.

Arguably, the average “Westerner”, including Americans, from today does not live better than their 50s counterparts.

The average non white-male westerner disagrees

In 1950s, a woman wouldn't even be able to get into universities like Yale.

No, that’s just what shareholders want you to think so you keep working hard at making their lives better.

The assumption was that work weeks would get shorter (15 hours / week), but perhaps it is more that careers can be shorter (work for a decade and then retire). Read: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/09/15/a-brief-history-o...

Yeah, but aren't we going in the opposite direction, with many countries raising their retirement age due to longer life expectancies?