I would say, we are facing issues with our CULTURAL reward function.
For very long now our culture have deified those few people that can overcome, achieve and excel. What if the point to our existence isn't to overcome our obstacles to productivity in "getting things done" - but instead to go out, explore, create, drink, eat & be kind to each other within a relatively small community of people. I'm not saying that I know what that looks like, but I know I've wanted to run into the woods and never come back, a good few times now.
What if, for some of us, it's neither? Not just getting arbitrary things done, with $things being a free variable. And not just living a life in maintenance/standby mode - the "drink, eat and be kind" part. To me, the latter sounds empty, and the former sounds pointless - because the whole point is that free variable. The things we do.
One of the nice and addicting things about videogames is that they tend to set a goal in front of you that you emotionally care about, and then let you achieve it step by step through wits and skill. The goal is relevant, achievable; the steps and the outcomes have clear impact on your progress towards that goal, and the feedback is pretty much immediate.
This is in contrast to our modern lives. There are almost no large, social-scale goals that are achievable by individuals or small groups. There are goals in the smaller communities, but smaller communities these days are less present and more fluid. And even among the goals affecting you and those close to you, achieving them tends to feel either like following a tutorial (no point in having agency), or like a game of chance (work, love). The feedback is distant, failure and success both turn your "gameplay" upside down.
I'm not totally convinced of this, but I have this feeling that the problem of our cultural reward function is that today, it's mostly defined as "do whatever you like, be whoever you want to be". Maximum freedom, but minimum direction.
>set a goal in front of you that you emotionally care about, and then let you achieve it step by step through wits and skill.
This reminds me of the concept of achieving a flow state. Find a meaningful goal that forces you to be focused while on the cusp of exceeding your skill level. One that is both creative and allows you to progressively increase your abilities. That seems to be an integral part of finding purposeful "work" that helps one find purpose. I also think this is why people are drawn to "craftsman" type hobbies like woodwork, brewing, and programming.
>I'm not totally convinced of this, but I have this feeling that the problem of our cultural reward function is that today, it's mostly defined as "do whatever you like, be whoever you want to be". Maximum freedom, but minimum direction.
This is right on the money as far as I'm concerned, see the throngs of men flocking to people like Jordan Peterson.
You don't have to imagine. You can do a real cultural economic comparison to other countries:
Italy, Greece, Russia, Spain (and others) are countries that index more on your proposed value system: socialization, family, quality of life over hard work.
China, Japan and the US index very highly on the productivity side of the spectrum, China probably significantly more than the US.
Some of those QOL-indexing countries also have high unemployment rates and relatively lower GDP per capita.
Unemployment + GDP are probably the wrong things to optimize for. Personally I believe Unemployment is overloaded as our optimization function for economic health, where median wage increase is more representative of livability.
One question I have (and genuinely can't guess at): if you are unemployed in Greece, on average, what exactly is your quality of life?
All that said, there are countries that strike a healthier balance with strong economies: Germany, Canada, UK.
Zooming way out, my take on productivity generally is: human pressure to push our productivity is inevitable because we still need to solve some very hard, expensive problems:
(1) Our history of industrialization has led to
unsustainable environmental impact. This may require 10-100x the engineering focus & coordination we've ever had before.
(2) Disease still has significant impact.
(3) We still need human labor to harvest and transform resources (agriculture, metals)
(4) We still need human labor to generate more "life necessities" supply: electricity, housing, water / plumbing.
One could argue that for (3) & (4) we can be more like Germany and we'll still do great. Also one could argue that if we increased taxes / shifted government spend to subsidize housing development (vs. home ownership) we might also be fine.
>Unemployment + GDP are probably the wrong things to optimize for. Personally I believe Unemployment is overloaded as our optimization function for economic health, where median wage increase is more representative of livability.
This is likely well known, it'd just be awful if the official measure of QOL put pressure on employers to raise wages. Better to measure something more abstractly valuable.
The fact is that society benefits and advance because some humans do extraordinary things, for example the Guthemberg's printer, crossing the Ocean,antibiotics, diodes, transistors, computers, going to the moon...
Society rewards you because you give the society. And it is a good thing, because the cultures that do that improve, and the cultures that not collapse.
I am in Spain right now which has a more socialistic culture, "subsidizing everything" and punishing the productive(progressive taxing). In lots of ways the society is collapsing because of that,everybody wanting to be subsidized,lots of unemployment, debt skyrocketing and productive people leaving to other countries.
> facing issues with our reward function
I would say, we are facing issues with our CULTURAL reward function.
For very long now our culture have deified those few people that can overcome, achieve and excel. What if the point to our existence isn't to overcome our obstacles to productivity in "getting things done" - but instead to go out, explore, create, drink, eat & be kind to each other within a relatively small community of people. I'm not saying that I know what that looks like, but I know I've wanted to run into the woods and never come back, a good few times now.