What we value
Over roughly the last 150 years, especially in rich countries, the average person has gained access to a much wider space of things they can plausibly value, because survival consumes a much smaller share of life.
In 1875, for a large fraction of humanity, value was heavily constrained by necessity: food, shelter, family survival, physical safety, religious community, local reputation, and keeping a livelihood. You could certainly care about art, philosophy, love, beauty, status, politics, craftsmanship, or self-expression, but material conditions sharply limited how much time and freedom you had to organize your life around those things.
Industrialization, sanitation, antibiotics, electrification, mass education, labor protections, declining infant mortality, shorter workweeks, pensions, consumer abundance, contraception, cheap travel, communications, and eventually the Internet progressively loosened that constraint. Once fewer people are asking “Will my children survive?” or “Will we have enough food this winter?”, much more cognitive and social bandwidth becomes available for questions like:
Do I like my career? Is this meaningful? Am I expressing myself? Is my work aligned with my values? Am I fulfilled? Do I have autonomy? Is my relationship emotionally satisfying? What kind of person do I want to become?
Those aren't new human capacities. Plato, Buddhist monks, Roman aristocrats and medieval mystics obviously had existential concerns. What's historically unusual is the mass democratization of existential choice. Questions once disproportionately available to elites, clergy or people with unusual security became normal questions for millions of ordinary people.
Material progress doesn't necessarily make dissatisfaction disappear. It can move dissatisfaction upward in abstraction. If your primary problem is hunger, “my work lacks meaning” barely registers. If food, housing and physical safety become reasonably secure, then autonomy matters enormously. Once autonomy improves, identity and purpose become salient. Once those improve, people may start worrying about authenticity, self-actualization, belonging, impact, or whether their life is being wasted.
The expanding possibility set actually creates new ways to feel deprived.
The knowledge worker's complaint, “I am paid $180,000 to manipulate abstractions on a laptop and I don't know why any of this matters,” would be almost incomprehensible as a socially widespread problem in 1875. It is an extraordinarily affluent kind of distress. Our expectations of a good life have changed.
There has also been another huge shift: institutions used to supply more of the value structure automatically. Family, religion, neighborhood, class, profession, nation, gender roles, local associations and inherited traditions told people, often coercively, what mattered and what their place was. Modernity weakened many of those structures while simultaneously increasing personal freedom. That's mostly an enormous gain.
However....
more freedom to choose what matters → more responsibility for constructing a life that matters.
And careers partly rushed into the resulting vacuum. That's essentially what “Workism” is. If religion, community and inherited vocation become weaker, a prestigious career can provide status, tribe, identity, progression, rituals, moral narrative and purpose all at once.
Then AI arrives: “That thing around which you organized your identity? A machine can apparently do quite a lot of it.” That can be psychologically destabilizing even if your paycheck remains unchanged.
I suspect the really long-run historical story is therefore not simply that humans have become richer. It's that the frontier of what humans expect from life keeps expanding. In 1875, mass prosperity was an extraordinary aspiration. By 1950, people increasingly expected security. By 1980, autonomy and personal fulfillment. By the 2000s, meaningful work. Increasingly now, people expect work to be meaningful, interesting, socially valuable, psychologically healthy, flexible, well-compensated and compatible with a rich personal life.
Our ancestors didn't necessarily value less. They had a much narrower feasible set over which their values could operate.
And if AI really does generate radical abundance, this process could accelerate enormously. The great problem might eventually stop being “how do we allocate scarce labor?” and become “what do billions of humans decide is worth wanting when necessity no longer answers the question for them?”