Nothing Is Ever Enough

I’ve never been more productive than I am right now. The tools I use are better than they’ve ever been. I can write code faster, automate more, ship things in a fraction of the time it used to take. And yet I don’t feel like I have more time. I feel like I have less. The bar moved. It always moves.

That feeling — that no amount of output is ever sufficient — has been sitting with me for a while. It disguises itself as a personal failing, but it’s structural. Baked into the way work is organised under capitalism. The system doesn’t have a concept of “enough.” It has a concept of “more.”

This isn’t new. The pattern goes back to the earliest labour-saving technologies. When the power loom mechanised weaving, textile workers didn’t get shorter days. They got larger quotas. When the assembly line made manufacturing faster, the gains went to throughput, not to rest. When computers automated office work, we didn’t shrink the workweek. We invented more work to fill it. Email. Reports. Meetings about the reports. The technology changed. The logic didn’t.

To be fair, the workweek did shrink over the twentieth century, from sixty-plus hours to roughly forty. Real wages rose. Labour movements fought for and won genuine concessions. But that trend stalled decades ago. Since the 1970s, productivity has kept climbing while wages flatlined and working hours stopped falling. The gains kept coming. They just stopped flowing back to the people doing the work.

Every time a new technology arrives, the pitch is the same: this will free you up. And every time, the freed-up capacity gets captured. By shareholder return expectations. By performance metrics that ratchet but never relax. By a labour market where “doing more with less” is the baseline, not the exception. Productivity gains don’t become time. They become margin.

AI is the latest version of this. And I say this as someone who uses AI tools daily and finds them useful. They make me faster. They make certain kinds of work (boilerplate, repetition, scaffolding) almost trivial. I’m not dismissing the technology. What I’m questioning is who benefits from the speed.

Faster doesn’t mean done sooner. If I can do in four hours what used to take eight, the response is never “take the afternoon off.” It’s “great, here’s four more hours of work.” The four-day work week was arguably possible decades ago. AI makes it even more possible — and somehow, even less likely. The incentive structure doesn’t reward giving time back. It rewards extracting more from the time that’s there.

There’s something deeper going on, though. It’s not just economics. Productivity has become an ideology, a moral framework we’ve internalised so thoroughly that it shapes how we see ourselves. Being busy is virtuous. Rest feels like laziness. Taking a slow afternoon feels like stealing something. We measure our worth by our output, and when the output isn’t enough (and it’s never enough) we assume the problem is us.

I catch myself doing this constantly. Finishing a productive day and still feeling behind. Having a weekend where I didn’t build something and feeling guilty about it. The logic of capital has colonised my inner life to the point where I can’t always tell the difference between what I want and what the system trained me to want. That’s the part that unsettles me most. Not the exploitation — I can see that, name it, push back against it. It’s the way I’ve absorbed the values of the thing I’m criticising. The way “enough” stopped being a feeling I can access.

I think about Keynes predicting that by now we’d be working fifteen-hour weeks. He wasn’t wrong about the productivity. We got there. We blew past it. What he didn’t account for was that the system has no interest in letting people stop. Growth requires more. Profit requires more. And so we produce more, consume more, work more. Because the structure demands it, and we’ve forgotten how to ask whether we should.

There’s no individual fix for this. The treadmill is structural, and individual choices, while they matter, don’t change the speed of the belt. What I can do is name it. The feeling that nothing is ever enough isn’t a personal deficiency. It’s a feature of a system that needs you to always want more, do more, be more. Recognising that doesn’t make the feeling go away. But it does change what you blame. And the treadmill has been slowed before — not by individuals optimising harder, but by people organising together and demanding that the gains be shared. The forty-hour week wasn’t a gift. It was fought for. That history matters, because it means the question isn’t whether things can change. It’s whether we decide they should.