* Eat a bag of chips instead of cooking a meal.
* Watch a travel show instead of leaving the house.
* Binge watch a vlogger and become a superfan instead of nurturing a real symmetric friendship.
* Read books about how to draw but never fill a sketchbook.
* Buy a gym membership but never go.
Because delaying gratification is hard and we're just poor apes doing the best we can.
If every desire were satisfied as soon as it arose how would men occupy their lives, how would they pass the time? Imagine this race transported to a Utopia where everything grows of its own accord and turkeys fly around ready-roasted, where lovers find one another without any delay and keep one another without any difficulty; in such a place some men would die of boredom or hang themselves, some would fight and kill one another, and thus they would create for themselves more suffering than nature inflicts on them as it is.
While I see some truth in this kind pessimism, I don't think it means that so-called utopia is necessarily worse than the world we live in today. I agree that human problems aren't going away, but I think we underestimate the potential value of removing the need to have a "job" to acquire the basic necessities for survival and the amount of suffering that causes today.
Absolutely 100% not.
There is nothing pessimistic about my understanding of the human condition. I love that humans are this way: that our greatest sense of satisfaction comes not from infinite self-indulgence, but from strenous labor in service of those we care about. What could be more noble than that?
(Of course, I admit that I only perceive it as noble because of thousands of years of evolution where tribes of humans that cooperated were more fit than ones that didn't. But I am a human, and if I have to evaluate my value system using my value system, I'll choose to evaluate it positively.)
My issue is with systems that deliberately or as an unintended emergent property run afoul of human nature. Working well with human nature should be the ultimate goal of any tool or system used by humans. The things we build should help us flourish in all of the ways that our species has evolved to do best in. If a chair is comfortable on your butt, it's a problem with the chair, not the butt.
If from this advancement we will be able to get 4 day work week and 4 day weekend it will be huge thing.