I very much agree with the author's thesis here. I think there is a kind of derangement especially among SV types about making every job about rescuing the world. And I think it comes from exactly this place of the human need for spirituality which is currently starved. But I had to screech the breaks for a second at this conjecture.

> Their work was a matter of subsistence and necessity; it was not a race for status or an existential search for meaning.

As far as I can tell, this cannot be farther from the truth. Pre-industrial people explicitly found existential meaning in their labor.

Their culture, religion and traditions enveloped every aspect of life. Their spiritual frameworks provided direction on everything like how to milk a cow, how to prepare meals, whom to marry and how to raise children.

Milking a cow and raising a child were responsibilities conveyed by a celestial benefactor. The proper execution of both paid praise and showed thankfulness to that benefactor. In this way labor was suffused with meaning.

Humans lost this for sure. This is partly why labor strife was so intense during the industrial era. People were not just stripped of their standard of living but also of a huge part of their ability to structure the world around them. Without a labor environment suffused with meaning they became desperate. It took their agency and dignity. The Luddites for example were driven more by disdain for the subservience the factory system creates than by a fear of total displacement.

This kind of modernist/progressive thinking towards history is probably the worst thing people take away from high school and undergrad history courses. It's so misleading and it creates this psychic barrier that most people never break down.