Bret’s argument rests on a bad assumption. He treats sex and money as if they were the core meaning or structure of human life, and that removing their “cost” somehow leaves us empty.
But that’s like saying our lives lost direction when we stopped washing dishes by hand, or when we stopped making our own clothes, or when we no longer had to farm just to survive. Those things were never our purpose they were chores that consumed our time. The moment technology freed us from them, we didn’t collapse; we simply had more time to do things we actually cared about.
Same here. Money and sex were never the meaning of life they were pressures that forced us to spend huge parts of our day just staying afloat. For the first time, we’re slowly removing those pressures. That doesn’t make us directionless; it gives us space to explore who we really are and what we actually want to do.
When people finally have time and resources, they think about inequality, they question the status quo, they demand things they didn’t have the bandwidth to demand before. It’s no coincidence students have always been behind major social movements they were the ones with both intelligence and spare time.
We aren’t becoming emptier. We’re just no longer stuck in survival mode. We’re finally able to grow in ways that aren’t purely material emotionally, socially, intellectually. We’re not losing ourselves. We’re actually starting to discover ourselves.
