The main reason is because human desires are inexhaustible. As our society gets wealthier, more people will be hired to perform tasks that make people's lives easier, though those tasks are ancillary to an organization's main mission. For example, the university's main mission is to educate students, but more and more administrators and staff will be hired to turn the university into a luxury resort to satisfy students' desires (big gym, mental health services, remedial education, sports, expensive food, transportation systems). And the university will also use more of its wealth to satisfy its employees' desires and problems (by hiring human resources officers and lawyers and hedge fund managers). That happens to every organization as it grows wealthier, I suspect. And those jobs, being ancillary, being divorced from directly helping people, are miserable. So, paradoxically, inexhaustible human desire for what is "better" and easier ends up creating jobs that, while comfortable, feel wretched and meaningless.
You see this in a society, too. Yes, our individual desires for "food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on" are never sated. It's partly because we're trying to keep up with our peers, but much more importantly, it's the hedonic treadmill. That is, the satisfaction we feel after buying a BMW or becoming CEO or getting a new house will fade quickly - and be replaced with the desire for something else. No doubt even the world's wealthiest people are dissatisfied with some aspect of their daily lives. Perhaps they wish for faster travel than is possible with current airplanes or for a longer lasting house or less crime or more love or whatever. That's a microcosm of what happens to the world's wealthiest societies, which, after all, are composed of people. It's why we've moved from Bell phones to iPhones, but it's also why we have so many more ennui-creating jobs.
More dissatisfying jobs? Really? Have you seen what most people used to do in the past, and with what resources?
If more are indeed "dissatisfied", methinks it's because they have the relative luxury of dissatisfaction in place of the harsh existential reality of survival. As the Tappit brothers noted: the difference between two headlights and one headlight is a lot less than the difference between one headlight and no headlight. Those with Bell phones complained little because the alternative was writing a letter or walking - or not communicating at all - to another person; we complain of phones as we do now because we can't imagine not having at least a landline handy.
It depends on where and how far back you want to look. A lot of Americans worked in morally repellent conditions in factories for little pay in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Earlier, though, I suspect being a wainwright or blacksmith or bookbinder - crafting a final good and seeing directly how it benefited your customer - was more satisfying than working as a corporate lawyer or a university administrator.
The Industrial Revolution allowed us to solve more and more desires. All of our basic ones are satisfied (in the West, for 99% of people). But the treadmill of desire continues, so jobs were created to satisfy those, too. And they feel fake because those jobs are increasingly divorced from central, "real" human desires.
There's actually a hard limit. e.g. Retina displays are as good as you need because they are finer than the eye's ability to distinguish.
Likewise there are only so many hours in the day, and days in your life. There is a hard (large) limit to what you can do in a lifetime. We may be increasing what we desire as resources become cheaper, but it is increasing asymptotically to 'what a person can consume/experience in the hours they have'.
> There's actually a hard limit. e.g. Retina displays are as good as you need because they are finer than the eye's ability to distinguish.
I'm sure someone will see value in a gold retina display. And if we get that done, I'm sure we'll start selling retina displays that have been baptised on pluto by the pope himself.
Most of us are not in a position to demand Plutonian displays. In an efficient market we'll take a functional one made in Korea. So in our market which is pretty efficient, there's a calculable reasonable bound to consumption.
You see this in a society, too. Yes, our individual desires for "food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on" are never sated. It's partly because we're trying to keep up with our peers, but much more importantly, it's the hedonic treadmill. That is, the satisfaction we feel after buying a BMW or becoming CEO or getting a new house will fade quickly - and be replaced with the desire for something else. No doubt even the world's wealthiest people are dissatisfied with some aspect of their daily lives. Perhaps they wish for faster travel than is possible with current airplanes or for a longer lasting house or less crime or more love or whatever. That's a microcosm of what happens to the world's wealthiest societies, which, after all, are composed of people. It's why we've moved from Bell phones to iPhones, but it's also why we have so many more ennui-creating jobs.