But the rich will always have something newer, cooler and more exciting available to them that the rest of us can’t afford. Almost everything you currently own, rent, or touch was, probably not that long ago even, only available to the rich. But now you have them, but the rich still have access better versions. Once only the rich owned cars, now pretty much every that wants a car has a car, pretty darn nice cars too, but we don’t have Bugatti Veyrons. And yes 20 years from now most if not all the stuff that make today’s Veyrons awesome will be in Nissan Sentras, but Bugatti will have added newer more amazing feature by then that we could never hope to afford... until they too become cheap and common place.
That’s the cycle. New things start off in the high end market and move down, but there’s always another high end thing. Raising the standard of living brings up both the floor and ceiling. Poor people now have things rich people in the 80s couldn’t even dream of (remember 80s cellphones), but the stuff that poor people have now is still dog crap compared to what rich people have. And even in a mass automated, 3D printed, self driving world that gap will remain. Rich people will have better 3D printers printing better stuff than you and I. And poor people will still be having riots while claiming to be horribly mistreated while never bothering to think about just how actually well off they are.
When reality starts getting to me, when I start focusing too much on what isn’t in my grasp, I look up videos from those really crappy parts of the world where people live in the dump building shanty towns out of refuse. THAT’S adversity. The fact that my company is run by an idiot who just announcing there will be a 5% reduction in force over the next year just because that’s how he likes to run things and the last few layoffs were random enough that I have no way of figuring out which group I’m in is annoying, but I’ve got way too many ways to ride that out without even reducing my expenses much less living in the dump, so it’s not adversity.
There's the piece that throws a monkey wrench into whole idea of a mechanized world where very few people actually work. Mechanization will not change that cycle. For people to simply wait until the few people that are working get around to figuring out how to make that "new thing" available to them seems anathema to the aspects of human nature we ought to be trying to foster, rather than have fall into disuse and atrophy.