If you put the price on the free time (as e.g. opportunity cost, or cost of saving resources), you can see leisure as a form of consumption.
The problem of many Western societies is that the cost of leisure is too damn high for many.
This is partly because the efficiency of work (its value for advancing a business project) is non-linear with time spent. Someone spending 100 hours a week maybe pretty inefficient due to overwork and thus lower (even negative) quality of things done. Someone spending 10 hours a week could be also inefficient because the project moves faster (when everyone else around works 40 hours), or the competition moves faster. So there is a range of maximum efficiency, which is hopefully far from 100 h/week, but also likely far from 10 h/week.
"Gig economy" can help: you work hard 2-4 months for a high rate, then coast 4-6 months at a nice place with low cost of living. The problem, of course, is that you must have saved a pretty thick cushion of assets for the case when a new gig is not coming when you planned.
>This is partly because the efficiency of work (its value for advancing a business project) is non-linear with time spent. Someone spending 100 hours a week maybe pretty inefficient due to overwork and thus lower (even negative) quality of things done. Someone spending 10 hours a week could be also inefficient because the project moves faster (when everyone else around works 40 hours), or the competition moves faster.
I'd go further. Most products and projects are BS busywork, if not actively harmful and they shouldn't be part of the economy in the first place.
We've created a huge society middlemen, procurers, and snake-oil salesmen, and turned increasingly more aspects of life into commercial endeavours, where ever more people are constantly hustling and peddling something (manufactured crap, of which there are untold tons [1], planned obsolesce replacement products, their image, and so on).
If a product finds some customers (maybe ultimately unsatisfied, or disappointed, or gaslighted customers), there must be a need that the product is filling. It's only filling it poorly.
Finding such toxic-but-still-used product is a good opportunity to both make a living and improve life in general. I suppose the hardest part is to detect and understand the real need being filled.
Certainly enough, education, and other ways to change culture, is a more profound way to change the way people fill their needs, and especially what they even perceive as needs. E.g. the need to serve a bloody revenge is by now mostly absent from a typical Western society, while the need to one-up a neighbor is still pretty widespread.
>If a product finds some customers (maybe ultimately unsatisfied, or disappointed, or gaslighted customers), there must be a need that the product is filling.
Well, I'm a believer in an objective world in which not all needs are equal.
I can accept that which need is important or not can be difficult to ascertain. But I also hold that in many, if not most, cases, it's very easy.
Despite the cult of the individual and the reverence with which subjective taste is held, I'd go on record to say that some (most) people have buy products that fulfill irrelevant non-needs.
For an easy to agree with (but real) example, heroin addicts ands Milli Vanilli listeners both buy products that "fill a need". The question is more whether they should.
If you think about the list of "irrelevant non-needs" from e.g. 15th-century Europe (your choice of country), or from any sufficiently different contemporary culture (consider China or Saudi Arabia), maybe your idea of "objective" needs will... expand a little bit.
If for some reason you prefer today's Western culture to that of 15th century, be certain that it changed mainly because of some people pursuing their irrelevant non-needs, as seen by then-contemporary "normal people".
The problem of many Western societies is that the cost of leisure is too damn high for many.
This is partly because the efficiency of work (its value for advancing a business project) is non-linear with time spent. Someone spending 100 hours a week maybe pretty inefficient due to overwork and thus lower (even negative) quality of things done. Someone spending 10 hours a week could be also inefficient because the project moves faster (when everyone else around works 40 hours), or the competition moves faster. So there is a range of maximum efficiency, which is hopefully far from 100 h/week, but also likely far from 10 h/week.
"Gig economy" can help: you work hard 2-4 months for a high rate, then coast 4-6 months at a nice place with low cost of living. The problem, of course, is that you must have saved a pretty thick cushion of assets for the case when a new gig is not coming when you planned.