Building venture firm, @DaybreakVCP. Previous to this was at the well known, @IndexVentures. Rex is an avid writer about how technology & people intersect at http://digitalnative.tech.
Guest Author: Rex Woordbury
I’m calling “peak work.”
Over the past few years, workday signoff times have moved earlier. This trend-line is relatively new (and certainly partly due to the pandemic).
But there’s also a broader trend at play: In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that his grandkids would work a 15-hour workweek.
By the 21st century, he said, we would work Monday and Tuesday, then have a five-day weekend.
What Keynes missed was that work is as much a product of *culture* as it is of technology. And work has increasingly become the foundation of culture.
America’s top 10% of earners work an average of 4.4 hours more each week than those in the bottom 10%. Why is that? Work is intertwined with identity. That’s beginning to shift.
On technology front, AI should increase worker productivity. Past technologies did the same, and we still worked a lot (output per worker just went up). But I expect AI allows for a marginal decrease in working hours. The other big change is cultural.
Younger generations aren’t as work-obsessed as their parents & grandparents, and you can feel a pushback on a work-centric culture.
Where an older cohort of workers placed work at the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy—self-actualization—younger workers place work at the bottom, fulfilling basic needs like food and shelter.
Younger workers don’t live to work; they work to live. I expect that AI + cultural shifts both bring about a gradual decline in hours worked.
Check out the original tweet here.
