What happens when a society enjoys so much wealth that it can free its entire citizenry from scarcity? Would it allow everyone to work less, ensure everyone has enough, and create time for family and community?

Would it surprise you to learn that in a consumer culture, when it arrived at just this place by the 1980s, instead had its citizens work more than ever before?

What happened here? How did this culture miss out on the true opportunities of affluence?

John Maynard Keyes, an economist writing in the early 1930s at the start of the Great Depression, imagined our future freed from the grip of the consumer culture, freed from the need to endlessly produce and consume.

Keyes predicted our world would enjoy so much wealth, largely through income growth, that we would no longer live in scarcity. Instead, with enough for everyone, we would stop working most of the time, only laboring fifteen hours a week, leaving time for community and the connection and creativity that came alongside it.

By the 1980s, Americans had surpassed Keyes’ predictions for economic prosperity and then got much richer than that. But our world failed spectacularly at freeing us from the chains of production, instead working us more than ever before. What happened?

Instead of feeling we had enough as we grew richer, the economic powers at the heart of the consumer culture manufactured endless feelings of scarcity. Through advertising, we were convinced that we’d only feel satiated when we satisfied an ever-growing set of manufactured needs.

This deception led us to feel we had less and less, even when we were experiencing more. Instead of working less as John Maynard Keyes had predicted, we found ourselves working more to buy more, and becoming busier than ever.