"A typical workday begins with the alarm clock. You shower, dress, eat and leave the house."

"You walk, drive, bike or train in to work; you chat with your co-workers; you stress over your to-do list; you meet with your boss or underlings; you sit at your desk and stare into the screen. Before you get home, you’ve probably also eaten lunch, run errands, hit the gym or the basketball court, and perhaps visited a friend or a relative."

That's the first paragraph of an article about the problems of retirement. (What happens when you lose all that structure and stress?) But I found that description of the "typical workday" implausible. Even assuming the typical worker has a desk job, I find it hard to believe that on a typical day, a working person slots in exercise, errands, and social calls on the same day.

This narrative of busyness and stress... is that what life is really like?

You know, back in the 1950s and 60s, you would constantly read about the problem of excessive leisure time. In the modern world — with automation and so forth — people would have so much free time it would be a problem. Are we living in the solution to that problem? Who imposed that solution and how?