The Future The Jetsons Promised

Why We’re Still Waiting for the 15-Hour Work Week

I’m rewatching Stranger Things and one thing keeps hitting me wrong. Not the Demogorgons or the government conspiracy—that’s just fun 80s horror pastiche. It’s the setting. The show traffics in a very specific nostalgia for 1980s suburbia: kids on bikes, moms at home, dads with steady jobs, the worst problem being whether the arcade has your favorite game available.

That wasn’t my 1980s.

My 1980s was rural Utah. My dad drove truck—long hauls that kept him gone for days at a time. Not because he didn’t want to be there, but because that’s what it took to keep six people fed and housed. My mom worked too, early shifts that meant she was up before dawn, home in time to manage four kids and all the invisible labor that entails. We had the farm on top of that, because you needed multiple income streams and your own food production to make the math work.

I still watched The Jetsons though. Probably on one of those afternoons when both parents were working and I was old enough to keep an eye on the younger kids. George Jetson complaining about his exhausting workweek: three hours a day, two days a week, pushing buttons at Spacely Sprockets. His robot maid Rosie did the housework. His flying car was just there. The future was going to be so easy we’d barely have to work at all.

Meanwhile, my actual father was somewhere on I-80 hauling freight for 60+ hours a week.

The promise was a lie. Or more precisely: the promise was technically achievable. We just made questionable choices about who got to benefit from it.

The Optimists Were Right About The Technology

In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes wrote “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” He predicted that by 2030, we’d be working 15-hour weeks. Technological advancement would be so dramatic that we’d solve “the economic problem” and spend most of our time on leisure, culture, and self-actualization. Buckminster Fuller was even more radical—he insisted technology could provide abundance for everyone, that scarcity was artificial, that we could design systems where everyone thrived.

The Jetsons, premiering in 1962, was just pop culture catching up to what serious thinkers had been saying for decades: automation would liberate us from drudgery. We’d work less and live better. That was the deal.

Here’s the thing: they were right about the technology. Productivity has more than doubled since 1973. We produce vastly more value per hour of human labor than we did when my dad was young. The technological capacity to work less while maintaining or improving living standards is real. The robots exist—they’re mostly just software now, not Rosie the maid, but the principle holds.

So what happened?

The Great Divergence

I work as an HVAC analyst now—I spend my days monitoring building systems, watching pressure gauges and flow rates, looking for early signs that something’s going wrong before it becomes catastrophic. Patient observation of systems, paying attention to what the instruments actually show rather than what you hope they’ll show.

So let’s look at what the economic instruments show.

From roughly 1948 to 1973, productivity and wages moved together. When workers produced more value per hour, they got paid more per hour. The basic bargain held. Then, around 1973, the lines diverge. Productivity keeps climbing—we keep getting better at producing value. But wages flatline. The gains flow somewhere else. Up, mostly. To shareholders, to executives, to people who own rather than do.

This isn’t a mystery or natural law of economics. It’s the result of specific policy choices: union busting, the shift from stakeholder to shareholder capitalism, tax policy that favors capital over labor. We could have had the Jetsons’ future—shorter hours, shared prosperity, technology serving human flourishing. Instead we got my dad driving 60-hour weeks while productivity doubled and the benefits accumulated elsewhere.

The promise wasn’t impossible. It was stolen.

The System Is Crashing (And That’s An Opportunity)

When you watch pressure gauges for a living, you learn to recognize when a system is approaching failure. When the contradictions become too large to ignore. When the instruments are screaming that something fundamental is wrong.

We’re there.

The system that promised prosperity for hard work is visibly failing to deliver. Millennials and Gen Z are the first generations in American history to be poorer than their parents. Housing costs have decoupled from wages. The gig economy asks people to be perpetually available while calling them “independent contractors” to avoid giving them benefits or stability. People are noticing. “Quiet quitting” and “lying flat” and the Great Resignation aren’t aberrations—they’re rational responses to a system that broke its own promises.

This is dangerous. Systems in crisis either reform or explode. But it’s also opportunity. When the old certainties are breaking down anyway, that’s when we can ask fundamental questions: What’s the economy for? What do we actually value? How should we organize ourselves?

What We Actually Want

Here’s what I believe: most people want to do something. They want to contribute, to create, to be useful, to make things. That’s deeply human.

What kills the spirit isn’t work itself—it’s the alienation. Grinding away at tasks you don’t care about, making profit for people you’ll never meet, with no autonomy over your time or methods, watching the best hours of your life disappear into someone else’s ledger.

My dad feeding the animals when he got home from a haul—that was work. My wife preparing our solstice feast—work. Our mutual aid network sharing labor and resources—work. Me monitoring building systems when I’m actually solving problems—also work. As is the writing of these little articles, for an audience of a few.

But some work is work that matters, work where you see the purpose, work done with autonomy in how you approach it. Other work is … not.

The goal isn’t “nobody works.” It’s “everyone gets to do work that feels meaningful, in conditions that don’t destroy them, with enough time and energy left over to also just... live.”

The Jetsons weren’t wrong about what was possible. They were just naive about who would control the gains.

The Long View

I’m counting down roughly 60 pay periods until I can retire from federal service. Twenty years of watching building systems, tending the pressure gauges, keeping the lights on and the heat running. It’s honest work. It’s necessary work. But it’s also enough work.

My dad worked until his body couldn’t take it anymore. He tried so hard to be there for us, to provide, to make the math balance out. He believed in the promise—that if you just worked hard enough, things would get better, your kids would have it easier.

I want to believe he was right about that last part. That the arc bends toward something better. Not because of magic, but because we’re finally in a position to demand it. To point at the pressure gauges and say: look, the system is failing. We can see it. We have the data. And we have alternatives.

Those old optimists who promised 15-hour work weeks—Keynes and Fuller and the animators who drew George Jetson’s exhausting six-hour work week—they weren’t wrong. They were just early. And now the system is crashing, which means we finally have a chance to build what they imagined.

We were promised a future once. I think it’s time we actually claimed it.