How did we get so busy?

One analogy to consider is that peoples with argiculture had much worse living standard than hunters-gatherers. Yet, given that they were tied to a patch of ground, they've drove the hunters-gatherers out of their traditional hunting-gathering grounds and eventually took over the world.

The progress doesn't necessarily prefer better standard of living.

People with children are of course telling you that you are naive but I think your point of view is just as valid as anybody else's. If you have a very low overhead, and don't develop a taste for expensive things then you can live comfortably on a tiny income. I had a similar phase after college for about one year where I had dirt-cheap rent. I did odd-jobs such as house-painting, did about whatever I wanted and was actually saving money. It was a leisurely, comfortable year but of course I did not have many luxuries.

Then I moved to a big city and my entire savings was depleted almost instantly. I had to work two jobs to pay my bills with barely any time or money to do anything but work. It sucked really bad for about two years until I started moving up and earning a salary that allowed me to quit my second job.

Basically, though, everybody talking about their bills, mortgage, tuitions, etc. These are lifestyle choices and they require a certain amount of income to maintain. There's all kinds of reasons for making these choices. Because you genuinely want that life, because your spouse wants that life, because your friends are doing it, because that's what "normal" people do, etc. Some people want a lifestyle that they can only afford by working insane hours. Some people are able to afford all of that stuff with a 40 hour work week.

Society does tend to pressure you into doing these things in order to feel like you have "grown up" which I know all too well. But, there's many ways to live life and they don't all require 80 hours of work per week.

So you work 80 hours a week, meaning that you have almost no time to enjoy life with your kid... so that he can grow up to be like you and do the same thing, and presumably educate their children to do the same as well.

So your ideal of how things should be is to have a saga of people working their asses off, in theory for the good of the next generation, but in practice for nothing because the next generation will work their asses off for the good of the next one, etc.

Maybe it's culture shock (I'm a European) but honestly, how can anyone think that is "worth it"?

Usury. The only way money is generated is by debt. Debt, by definition is encumbered by interest. Thus, the only way to generate money to cover the interest is to generate more debt, this is a feedback cycle, requiring accelerating borrowing just to stay where you are. I think this is a large part of why we are so busy today. We are always behind the eight ball, at every level.

We have 2 toddlers; double-income household. We live at the edge of a small city center in Belgium.

Originally, we both worked full time, lived in a small house, and had income to spare to save some and do some small-scale travelling within Europe. With no kids, there was not really a lot of stress and "busyness" for us; the household chores had to be done in the evenings and weekends, but other than that we didn't feel overwhelmed. (Although it sometimes did feel that way anyway.)

After the first kid was born, my girlfriend started working 80% instead of 100%, to cope better with the additional tasks imposed by caring for the child. The second kid added to the child care burden, leading us to delegate some of the cleaning chores to a household helper (4hrs every 2 weeks), which is not for free. The situation stabilized, but we do feel overwhelmed by the tight planning of each day, and chores left to do in the evenings and weekends.

Weekends are not always relaxing any more: even family visits have a tendency to start feeling like a burden if they displace other things that you have to do, and if several of them queue up in the same weekend or if several consecutive weekends become fully booked this way. Also, we try to build in "down"time in the weekend to let the kids play or to do something with the 4 of us, but this becomes more difficult with all the other engagements competing for time.

I too have requested a contract change to work 90% instead of 100%, so that I can move some of the chores from the evening and weekend to a weekday. This will hopefully leave us with more relaxed evenings and weekends.

I realize that in some sense we're lucky that our finances permit us to trade some income for more time off work. I think (hope) we're approaching a OK balance between work, child care, "obligatory" off-work stuff, and "voluntary" off-work stuff.

(Note: 100% means 40hrs/wk here)