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A younger generation being able to create a life that doesn't require backbreaking, soulless, exploitative work is a good sign. It means that we've done our job to give them an easier future. I don't want my kids to have to work as hard or as much as I have. It's our duty to our descendents and will be their duty to theirs.
If you haven't read, Bertrand Russell in his "In Praise of Idleness" essay talks exactly about that, how technological progress should bring more idle time to workers. It's from the 1920s...
Instead we are under a system where almost all the extra productivity is siphoned away from the ones actually producing something, left with some breadcrumbs while those siphoning the product of labour keep constantly asking for more productivity from their workers for personal gain.
Historically any change to this system has only been achieved through bloodshed, which is very, very unfortunate...
Are we there yet? Can we all stop working because we've arrived? Well, no.
The problem is that we're still at a place where, if we all stop working, soon we all starve. Sure, we can maintain are current non-starving state with less backbreaking labor than it took a century ago, but there's still a huge amount of work needed to maintain that state.
So keep your goal, and keep working toward it, because we're not there yet. If we keep working on it, the next generation may have less backbreaking labor - not none, and not no work at all, just less.
This would require the idea of success as a business to change from constant growth to sustainability (in an economic sense). If we're able to shift our focus from constant growth to sustainability that will ultimately open up more time for us as a society to spend time away from work. To explore new ventures, to collaborate, to focus on answering questions that aren't profit-motivated. That's how we can slowly adapt to a society of minimally-exploitative work.
Someone has to start somewhere, and I'm hoping this younger generation can break us older generations out of our growth-motivated fog to begin adapting our society to sustainability rather than growth at all costs.
That hasn't changed in 200 years and it won't, any time soon.
That's the whole point. We work hard and give enough back to the world that the next generation have it easier, even to the point of them not knowing better. Things generally take care of themselves and your pessimism is unwarranted.
But yes, someone has to do work indeed.
Growing up, the plan was that the robots would do that and we would write poetry.
Kinda worked the other way around eventually.
Rent prices have gone up 17% since 2021, and average household income have stayed the same.
And people are going homeless! Single-person homelessness up 3% since 2020, and chronic homelessness has gone up 16% since 2020. All per HUD.
We ran out of carrots, but we have this nice stick here.
No they don't. If this was the case, salaries would be low across the board, instead there's an ever increasing wealth inequality. There are a lot of people with jobs because of organizational inefficiencies. Lots of people that are there for that one to two hours of work because it falls into a weird area that can't be assigned to someone else. And the company doesn't give a shit if these people did a lot more - if they did, they pay them to do it. Starbucks doesn't care if the manager walks in and cleans tables to a mirror shine every ten minutes, they care that it's clean and that all managers as a whole are following a protocol of wiping things down every hour.
But a lot of people have decided, that before the system finally collapses they could be parasites on the system. And it is hard to blame the people for making this rational decision.
Late stage capitalism looks very much like Soviet Union in 80-ties. The economy doesn't make sense, the system is wasteful, no one believes in official propaganda, there are no values that you could follow. But a little guy can at least take it easy and relax a bit.
As the saying goes - They are pretending that they are paying us fair wages, and we are pretending that we are working.