Long ago, when I was just six, I visited the Carousel of Progress at Disneyland. It was glorious. It was sponsored by one of my favorite companies, GE. It starred robots. Talking, moving, singing, interacting robots. Wow.

They showcased the progress that electricity has blessed us with over the decades, starting with the 1900s on up to the 1960s. By then, we were in such a fantastic age that our GE ranges would cook our dinners for us, GE washing machines would wash all of our dishes, GE refrigerators would keep fruits and vegetables garden fresh for days, and the TV and Hi-Fi center would make our homes a veritable bastion of relaxation and leisure.

One of the lines in the Carousel of Progress show was this: “Now we have much more time to relax and enjoy ourselves.” Meaning, because of these great conveniences and the time savings they provide us, we don’t have to spend nearly as much time working and can instead spend that time on leisure.

Today, in the actual 21st century, things are even more advanced. We’ve got home computers! And they’re all hooked together on this amazing thing called the internet. We don’t even have to write letters or actually make phone calls to order goods and services, we can do that online. We don’t have to travel to the bank, we can take care of that online. And with microwaves and cell phones and all the other stuff we have now, things are even more convenient.

Thus, we should have scads of time to relax and enjoy ourselves.

Right?

But we don’t. Do we?

Why? What happened to our leisure time? What happened to all of that phenomenal time savings that these conveniences were supposed to have brought us?

The answer is simple: our expectation level has gone up just as much. If not more so.

We just expect things to be quicker now. And consequently we’re expected to produce things faster.

After all, who expects that it takes weeks to get a package from one end of the country to another? Nobody. That’s why we have FedEx. And who waits six to eight weeks to receive something they ordered in the mail – excuse me, online? Nobody. We expect it overnight – or if we want to be cheap, in 3-5 business days. And that’s pushing it. Nobody expects photographs to take weeks to be developed anymore either. It’s either one hour or instantly, with the recent advent of digital photography.

So yeah, things are more convenient.

But they’re also moving at a breakneck pace. And we keep feeding the beast, too. The faster things become, the more we’re expected to produce in as much time. We’re at the point now where it’s nearly impossible for anyone to slow down, ever, to actually enjoy their life or to engage with their family. It’s becoming impossible to get off the roller coaster.

So the fact is, we’ll never get to that halcyon, fabled era of abundant leisure time. Not as long as we keep expecting more and more, quicker and quicker.