You're tapping a deeper discontent here and one that needs to be addressed in a detailed manner.

I'm going to cut and paste here so I can answer your thoughts as you express them.

When I was a kid, the future was being sold as a Jetson's world, not only with new gadgets and toys, but everything was going to be better. Because of increased productivity, not only would we all work less, but the work would be more fulfilling and more rewarding, both in turns of standard of living AND quality of life. We would all be more affluent and more educated, and life would be more meaningful because all the dirty, routine and boring tasks would be done by machine. The excess profits would be poured back into less hours on the job and more benefits, the continuation of a century of industrial progress was our heritage and our birthright.

Yes, it was sold that way. A classic example was the American Weekly Sunday newspaper supplement from 1955 that featured "This is your Future" and presented the microwave oven, the personal helicopter, sonic laundry. Your comments about the disillusionment mirror Thomas Hine, who wrote retrospective book back in 1987 called Populuxe in which he defined the 1953-1964 period as a material treasure trove for the working class - POPular LUXury or goods the masses used to be unable to afford. Hine looks at the period in a bittersweet manner, reconciling the mass consumption with the optimism that motivated the creating and buying of it.

The computer would turn us all into knowledge engineers, but no one warned us about data entry. No one told us that the satisfaction and pride of the skilled workman would be diminished by robotic mass production and dull, repetitive service work. Instant communications would create a global village where everyone was on the phone, talking to voice mail. Productivity would lead to such increases in wealth that poverty would disappear, and everyone's standard of living would go up. and with everyone working less, there would be ample work for everyone. Medicine and science would not only improve, it would be universally available for next to nothing, power would be too cheap to meter, television would have hundreds of channels, all of them different and exciting, and our cars would not only be faster and more comfortable, we would also use them to go to more interesting places with all our leisure time. There were no traffic jams and road rage in the Jetson universe, gas was always cheap, and the nation would not all look exactly the same.

In my library, I have the entire postwar New York Times Weekly Sunday Magazine in bound form from 1946-1959. This is an incomparable treasure trove of popular opinion and articles of this period. To be fair, for all the articles which promised a great future, they were matched, and probably outnumbered by predictions that were the exact opposite of the "Jetsons" happy future. Apocalyptic fear-mongering was actually just as popular as it is today (Now one has to remember this is the NYT;-) Population fears were on the top of the list and many of these folks quite accurately predicted a world of poverty, a world where the third world keeps expanding and the west succumbs to a combination of Soviet communism and etnic outnumbering. One article that stands out in my recollection, had graphs and pictures accompanying them, illustrating how the 1980s would already be bad and by the year 2000 America would be lost to a world that completely outnumbered the US and demanded more resources.

There was an article in 1951 which said television would doom nation by dooming the nation's kids. It showed how much time was spent by children in TV households and non-tv households doing things like reading or time spent on homework. It showed the grades these kids received. This outright anti-TV movement, as far as I can tell, never reappeared in the NYT magazine after 1952, TV was too powerful and too much advertising money was behind it - the same advertisers that paid for the NYT.

The incongruity of the apocalyptic/utopian predictions in this era are fascinating. The suburbs were filled with young families who wanted to fit in, who wanted a chance at a happy life. A Saturday Evening Post cover ca. 1959 summed it up best with a young couple looking at the stars, and in the stars they saw a vacuum cleaner, a new car, a home, a little league game, bridge parties, etc. The future was happiness and happiness was partially defined by material acquisitions.

In 1942 the baby boom was spawned by the fear that Johnny wouldn't come home from war. In the postwar period the fear was amplified and expanded - EVERYONE was now living under the shadow of death by a Soviet nuclear bomb. This fear spurred a bit of a "live it up because tomorrow may never come" attitude to purchases. New washers, driers, cars, televisions, stereos and more became a way of compensating for this fear - the orgy of consumption was partially an escape mechanism created by fear.

This is very important to realize. The materialist society is based on fear. The purchase of a home, car and all the rest is done to compensate the very nature of temporal existence. Each purchase is an investment in one's permanence.

Now you tell me - what is the psychological result of everyone witnessing mass purchases en masse?

The answer is insecurity.

The future "purchase" is a goal that can be worked for and saved for, and when it is finally bought, its power to salve this insecurity withers almost instantly. It must be replaced by yet another goal, another purchase. The rich are unhappy because they discover this quickly. The salve disappears almost entirely and insecurity overpowers them and sends them to drugs, power-tripping or some other escape mechanism.

Well, as always, the artists saw through the sham first. First, the Beat poets sounded the alarm, and by the early fifties, Vonnegut's "Player Piano", or if you prefer traditional science fiction, Pohl and Kornbluth's "The Space Merchants", showed us exactly where the future was actually going, with uncanny accuracy. They are the perfect antidote to Ayn Rand's entrepreneurial romances. By the time I was getting out of high school (the year Kennedy died and the Beatles became popular) it was pretty clear that we had been lied to. We were working just as hard as we always had, and all we had to show for it was consumer goods.

What happened was this: The children of the fifties grew up with the material goods and couldn't appreciate them or get the same "salve" out of them that their parents did. For mom it was enough to have a new washer/drier, vacuum cleaner and a dishwasher - things her mother never dreamed of and which did save her much time and labor. For her kids, these things were "normal" and they were jaded. It meant nothing to them and they held such materialism in disdain, interpreting it as a pacifier.

The Beats were right and wrong. It was a pacifier, but it was also progress. Ayn Rand was not advocating a materialist world of entrepreneurs, she was advocating a world of individual freedom. Her Galt's Gulch is a mini-utopia where everyone works, and their work is valued by everyone else. They can name their price for labor or services rendered. Sure, it's an escape mechanism too. For everyone who felt robbed by government or by the company they worked for, this was a bit of literary salve. It was not meant so much as a real solution, but rather as an ideal which demonstrated certain values that in the East she had realized were missing and which promoted misery, suffering and corruption. Ayn Rand was perfectly correct in pointing out the dangers of destroying individual freedoms in favor of the collective. She didn't have all the answers though, just one good facet of a larger societal puzzle.

You see, the technology has increased enormously, and prosperity has become more widespread, but the fact remains that we're not as happy as we used to be, that our social problems have been neglected, and that much-vaunted prosperity has been concentrated more and more on fewer and fewer people. By the time I got to college it was pretty clear to my contemporaries, not just the privileged youth of the managerial and professional elite, but working class kids like me, that precious little of this technological progress was trickling down to where it really mattered: quality of life. The only mistake they made was educating us, but that problem is now being corrected. Oh yeah, we're more prosperous, but we're not any happier. By any quantifiable measure, we are better off, I'll grant you that, but what about the rest, what really matters? Why is life in the Jetson universe so damned dull?

"If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"
"If you're so rich, why aren't you happy?"

Kennedy's death and the arrival of the Beatles was the depressing end note of the "Populuxe" period. What it really symbolized was an end of the almost boundless OPTIMISM this postwar period tried to embrace. After WWII optimism was all some nations had. In the US it was sold as a Jetson's future. In other nations it was sold as simply a roof over one's head and food on the table.

Happiness and optimism is what this nation now lacks. It's what this world lacks. All the fear-mongering, climate hysteria and medical drugs pushed are part of the problem. We live in a world that now fully exploits that fear of death. That constantly offers soulless diversions from thinking about the meaning of life. Sure, religion was packaged alongside materialism in the US. Church was a place to socialize and show that nice new hat and the pretty Sunday dresses bought for the girls. It was a place to try and put more salve on those fears - and now guilts that accompanied materialist pursuits. In the USSR the meaning of life was COMMUNISM the masses were more important than the individual and serving the masses was supposed to be enough. Both the West and the East failed in assuaging the people's gnawing fears and questions and neither religion nor state-sponsored atheism offers a viable solution.

What the world needs is answers. It needs to know what happens after death - really. It needs to see the reason for life...the processes by which the universe functions. It needs these things desperately. With them, one is no longer embracing various "ism's" as an escape. One sees the material life as part of a large puzzle and one's spiritual future is no longer some vague pink cloud affair, gifted at the whim of some emotional, judgemental God. This world needs to understand energy, for energy is the sum of everything - including us. Suddenly a real purpose arrives, a real understanding of what it means to be an ever-expanding, evolving component of an ever-expanding, evolving infinite universe.

Then everyone will be be rich, smart and happy. Because wealth is no longer measured in dollars or currency, but in knowledge. Brains are not measured in facts memorized, but in fundamental understanding of the universe and happiness will be constant - because unhappiness will be understood and valued for the tool that it is. A tool that forces one to find new perspectives and EXPAND one's mind and consciousness. Unhappiness is the flip side of happiness. You can't have one without the other. Soon the two get closer together and one no longer rides a roller coaster of highs and lows, but one is closer to equilibrium in regards to all things - because that is the way energy propagates best - the way WE function best.

This world is imbalanced and all of the solutions offered by the media, schools and religions are not solutions at all - merely diversions. The progress we have made in material comforts has NOT been equalled by mental progress. The mind of man is still too animal like, too wrapped in fear - and as a direct result: aggression.

We are energy. We are island universes. We need to understand what we are. Only then can a society be formed which respects our cumulative and individual needs and points us to a greater existence, giving more meaning to every action, every thought and understanding that our future consequences follow the sum of both.

SDAI-Tech1

PS
Thanks ER for posting. It helps the Zone reach it's potential for discourse.