Do gadgets make our lives easier?

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I started writing a response to a post by @MarieCoyle about inventions, and the response got so long I had to make it into a post of its own. Years ago (in the 50 and 60s) there was much talk about the life of leisure that we were all destined to enjoy, with so many labour-saving devices making life so easy. So what happened? Now it seems people are more harried and stressed than ever. It seems to me that people always want more and more 'stuff' so they have to work more to earn more to pay for it all. And they also just make more work for themselves in other ways as well, often due to peer pressure. For example decades ago, the family clothes were washed once a week, by hand, in a mammoth effort by the women of the household. People wore the same clothes every day (because that was all they had, pretty much) and made an effort to keep them clean with overalls, aprons and such, then they wore their clean 'best' clothes on Sundays and special occasions. Everyone was in the same position. Nowadays people have so many clothes and shoes, they have to buy more furniture to store them all, and often they only wear a garment once and then put it straight in the wash. They are afraid to be seen wearing the same garment two days in a row - what will their friends say? And forget ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ now they want to keep up with the social media influencers who are constantly showing off new clothes, which they don’t even own a lot of the time. So now, rather than having lots of free time because a washing machine is doing the work once a week (as envisaged when they were first invented), instead far more time is spent every day putting things in the machine, taking them out, hanging them up and bringing them in or putting them in and out of the drier, perhaps ironing them and then folding and putting them away. And of course it all uses more of our precious water, causes more pollution with all the detergent, uses more electricity to run all the machines (contributing to global climate change), and also wearing out the clothes faster so that more have to be bought, costing more, causing more energy use and pollution in the manufacture, causing more problems with disposal of the old clothes and the worn out washing machines etc. etc. Will humans ever learn? I suspect not. They are too susceptible to the opinions of others. All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2022.