By now, we should be working less. Today’s long working hours are not what some great minds of the past predicted. In the 1930s, the economist John Maynard Keynes said the workweek would be 15 hours long in the 21st century, and that our biggest challenge would be finding things to do. He figured that as our material needs were met, we would put aside more time for pleasurable things.

It never happened. Although working hours did decrease through the last century, some time in the 1980s, they started rising again, particularly in the United States. And now, with the line between work and home becoming increasingly blurred, we’re more tethered to our jobs than ever. The cell phone maintains a psychological connection to the workplace, even if we’re not physically in the workplace, or actually working. One Harvard Business School study found that professionals are “either working, or ‘monitoring’ work and remaining accessible” 80-90 hours a week.

In his terrific book Utopia for Realists, Dutch journalist Rutger Bregman talks about how “working less is the lost dream of the 20th century.” It’s the one thing that hasn’t got appreciably better, even as most other things have. Most of us have food, housing, and modern conveniences, but we don’t have a lot of time. As a society, we’ve effectively taken economic growth and translated it into “more stuff”–higher rates of consumption–rather than more leisure.

But Bregman hasn’t given up hope that we’ll eventually live out Keynes’s promise. Working long hours isn’t inevitable or necessary, he says; it’s actually a choice we make collectively and enshrine in norms and rules, like how it’s cheaper for employers to have one person work overtime hours than having two people work part-time hours. Bregman says we can change how, as a society, we get stuff done, if we do it together, and make it a political priority.

Increasingly, because of automation, we don’t need to work so much to produce the things we need. A lot of jobs don’t add social value; they shift value around, from one group to another. Bregman compares sanitation workers to stock traders. If the first group doesn’t work, we’re in trouble: the streets are filled with filth. If the latter group goes on a strike, nothing bad happens. These days, a lot of work falls into the second category, even if it’s highly compensated, giving it the appearance of value. It’s work designed to pay people a salary, not to actually achieve a social function. Surveys show how workers feel their jobs have no meaning or significance–which, in a sense, they don’t.

Here’s Bregman:

In a world that’s getting ever richer, where cows produce more milk and robots produce more stuff, there’s more room for friends, family, community service, science, art, sports, and all the other things that make life worthwhile. But there’s also more room for bullshit. As long as we continue to be obsessed with work, work and more work (while useful activities are further automated or outsourced), the number of superfluous jobs will only continue to grow.

Bregman argues in favor of a universal basic income, an idea he’s popularized in the Netherlands. Paying everyone a living wage would put a floor under the needy, and allow everyone else to escape the mindless routine of working the whole time, he says. It would reduce stress and workplace accidents, cut carbon emissions, allow parents to spend more time parenting, and lessen the domestic burden on women, who still do the lion’s share of housework. It might also reduce inequality: income gaps have grown most in countries where working hours are longest.