People have dreamt for many years about a world without work. In an essay in 1891, Oscar Wilde imagined a future where, “just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure — which, and not labour, is the aim of man — or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleas-ant work”. This year, rapid developments in artificial intelligence have reignited questions about whether machines might one day replace the need for human labour entirely. I am sceptical, not least because we humans have a remarkable ability to make work for ourselves. But let’s suppose for a moment that technological progress did usher in an age of leisure. Would we actually be able to cope with it?

When John Maynard Keynes speculated about the “economic possibilities for our grandchildren” in 1930, he thought the end of work as we know it might provoke a collective “nervous breakdown,” saying “I think with dread of the readjustment of the habits and instincts of the ordinary man, bred into him for countless generations, which he may be asked to discard within a few decades”.

Almost a century later, we don’t seem much closer to being able to adjust to a life of leisure. At least when Keynes was writing, people were moving gradually towards less work in their lives, with steady reductions in weekly working hours from one generation to the next. But that trend ground to a halt in the 1990s: usual weekly hours for full-time workers have averaged about 40 across OECD countries since then.