Hah. I very nearly posted this a few minutes ago. It is culturally and economically engrained that people work 5 days a week in 8 hour shifts. Despite technological advances, this is not something that I foresee going away anytime soon. Also, it's hard to picture what an entire civilization would do if suddenly everybody had twice as much free time. I would like to think it would be good, but maybe not entirely so. That said, there are way too many, as Graeber puts it "bullshit jobs". My last job was one, and I hope my next one is not. Busy work for the sake of working, and you have to work it otherwise you can't make a living. It really is a societal problem, but one that's too complex to pin on any one reason.
True. As a teacher, there are portions of my life (summer) where I have an unusually large portion of time off. Maybe it's because I'm used to it, but I don't have too much difficulty finding things I enjoy doing. Unfortunately, I also find a larger portion of my work becoming bullshit time spent. I now am expected to prove that my students have learned in ways beyond grading assignments and providing written feedback. I now must prove, with several Excel worksheets, that the kids are now able to do more than they could before I started teaching them as well as meet arbitrary goals that are set as "adequate learning targets". As if we actually can take a large group of individuals before instruction and reliably determine how much they will learn. Oh, also, there is no research available proving that collecting data in such a way improves student outcomes. More time spent on data collection and displays takes away from actual engagement with my students and/or planning creative learning experiences.