Haseeb Qureshi

Like I don't have to commute.

I don't have to go on a train.

I don't have to deal with, you know, all the bullshit of like hanging out and waiting.

People didn't even have phones when they were on their commutes before, you know?

So like, yes, our jobs are way easier than jobs were in the past.

No doubt about that.

That being said, and obviously I do knowledge work, so I'm somebody who, my job is particularly easy, but even among people who are doing physical labor, the kind of physical labor people were doing 100 years ago is unrecognizably brutal compared to the physical labor that people do today.

So, now why do I say all that?

There's always been this thinking for a long time, even from the time of Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes, this idea that as people got richer, they were going to work less and there's going to be more time for leisure, more time for play.

And what we have learned over time is that that's not actually what human beings want to do.

The richer that they get, the more that they want to work.

And that's very counterintuitive.

And I think the answer of why this is the case is that people actually really want to be valuable.

It's a deep human need to be valuable.

And there's this amazing study that showed that if you take elderly people, let's say who are like 63, 64, right?

Let's say the age of retirement is 65 in this country, okay?

If you're 63 or 64 and you're unemployed,

your quality of life is very bad.

People who are unemployed generally feel very bad about themselves.

They tend to, you know, sleep poorly.