I think there’s an even bigger issue than this.

Many people would not know how to live under such a system. By this, I mean that I strongly believe people would become severely depressed or insanely stir crazy.

I’ve been on an extended sabbatical after 20 years in tech. The first year was magical. “I could do this forever” I told myself, and actually considered it.

The second year was more complicated. I could feel myself drifting away from myself. The structure of work and the rewards of working on big projects were now fully missing, and I could feel this growing emptiness that needed to be filled.

For health reasons, I entered the 3rd year, and by that point I needed more major psychological intervention. I’d become severely depressed and while I knew that getting back to work might help, I was now in a position where going back to work sounded impossible.

I’m not claiming that my experience is universal. But I’ve started to find more accounts that are similar to mine. I’m also not saying it’s impossible to replace work as a form of necessary challenge and satisfaction. But the societal structures do not exist to fill the void.

For better or worse, we’ve been a species that relies on “work” in some form to live. I use quotes because clearly this has looked different ways over time. Hunter/gatherers certainly had a different set of tasks than the modern city dweller.

But ultimately I’m not convinced that we’re equipped to live satisfying lives without some form of striving for survival. In a post-work era, I think a lot of us will go some kind of crazy or experience depression.

I don’t think most people are aware of how awful things can feel after enough time away from work has stacked up.

It reminds me of that feeling when going on vacation somewhere nice. “I could just live here forever”. But the reality is that the thing that makes the vacation feel incredible is the contrast from normal life. Remove the contrast, and things become pretty flat.

Edited to change “most” to “many” in the 2nd paragraph because that better reflects my belief.

> The second year was more complicated. I could feel myself drifting away from myself. The structure of work and the rewards of working on big projects were now fully missing, and I could feel this growing emptiness that needed to be filled.

If you don't mind sharing — why did you not choose to do a big project? I've always imagined that if I were lucky enough to have a sabbatical/retire early, it's not that I wouldn't work, it's that I'd choose to work on stuff that is really important, but undervalued by society (which is the reason I can't do it as a living right now): e.g. activism & lobbying or volunteer work in the community.

I’ve asked myself the same question, because before taking the break I also had visions of working on important/meaningful/undervalued things on my own terms.

I think there were multiple factors. I hadn’t accounted for how much I relied on the work environment for social contact, and I didn’t have the social habits in place to maintain a healthy social life. This felt fine at first because I was also recovering from burnout, and solo road trips and adventures in the mountains felt great.

But every time I’d think about working on something, it felt insurmountable to my brain, and I just got stuck. I’d led huge projects in enterprise environments, but felt incapable of getting something going without some of the structure surrounding that.

I suppose it boils down to a skills issue. Had I realized I’d get so stuck, I may have prioritized a different set of activities. But one thing led to another and I was sliding down the depression slope at which point everything got exponentially more complicated.

I have to conclude that I could have done things differently and that could have led to a better outcome. But all of my professional success hadn’t prepared me for the personal habit changes I needed to implement to have a better outcome.

Completely understand that feeling, even with small things so get where your coming from. Thanks for sharing your experience.

As Carl Sagan said, we’re a species that needs a frontier. We need to explore. That’s how hunter-gatherers actually survived, by following the animal migration and pushing outwards when population pressure or ecological change demanded it.

I don’t see how our modern incarnation of plantation jobs is in anyway equivalent to that natural instinct. I don’t think that the vast majority of people would have as much trouble as you finding meaning in their lives without work - especially since 99% of them don’t even have a sliver of a chance at “fuck you money” like you did.

> especially since 99% of them don’t even have a sliver of a chance at “fuck you money” like you did.

I didn’t have “fuck you money”. Just enough to live a moderately frugal life on the equivalent of median income as long as the market didn’t tank.

The thing about your point that doesn’t make sense to me is that you’re describing a scenario in which 99% of people suddenly are in the same situation I was.

This is what they keep telling us. My hunch is that people will find plenty of "work" to do in their families, their communities, in creative pursuits. Let's find out.

We have found out, it's just that the people who do the finding out generally have money, so their opinion is automatically discounted.

It's a bit like forever single people getting so lost in the ideas of a relationship, intimacy. That everything will be great once they have someone, once they have connection, that life will be amazing and nothing else will matter. Their life sucks because they don't have a relationship. People in relationships don't know what it's like and their opinion is invalid.

Then they get in a relationship and learn that it's actually comparatively banal and requires a lot of work and compromise, and definitely was not the insanely-built-up-over-many-years-magical-life-cure-all.

There are -endless- stories of people who made it rich early on, retired, and ended up in a mental health crisis despite having everything. That fact should be taken as a reality check to calibrate your own perceptions.

Two things here:

I have no data either way but I can imagine that there are many more people who are wealthy and quietly having a great time with it. Most of the retired people I've known, early or not, also enjoyed it. Some have definitely taken up work-like pursuits on their own terms.

Secondly the wealth being the means to achieve this is itself a confounding variable. I don't think it's good for your mind or soul to "have everything," no. Life isn't and shouldn't be merely a series of your own preferences. That doesn't indicate to me that lacking confidence in your mere survival is necessary for human thriving. As far as I know research indicates the opposite.

My point is that I was firmly in the “I want to retire early” category, found myself with the means to do so, and that this wasn’t theoretical for me.

But the thing I imagined is not the reality that I found.

I realize “they” have other motives for convincing people such a future is a problem. But that doesn’t remove what I truly believe would be a hellish reality for many.

I’m all for pushing society in a less work-centric direction and think current work culture is toxic. That’s a big part of the reason I burned out and went on sabbatical.

But I’m also pretty worried about what a sudden shift without careful planning may bring about. I know I certainly didn’t have the habits/skills in place to navigate it in a healthy way.

If you switch from (forced) workaholism and burnout to the opposite, you're going to have whiplash. And perhaps PTSD.

I think the concept of personal freedom is hugely misunderstood. The US model seems to be some combination of wealth, privilege, and absence of social/financial obligation to others.

But we're seeing over and over that the people who attain that kind of freedom are often deeply unhappy, and sometimes deeply toxic.

Which is reflected all the way through work culture.

What would a non-toxic economy and work culture look like? Not just emotionally and personally, but in terms of social + economic structures and collective goals?

I've not seen many people asking the question. There's been a lot of oppositional "Definitely not like this", much of which is fair and merited.

But not so much "We could do try this completely new thing instead." Answers usually fall back to standards like "community" but there doesn't seem to be much thinking about how to combine big planet-wide goals with individual challenges and achievements with supportive social middleware that has to bridge the two.

I agree with this comment. If I’d started from a position where I had a better relationship with work, maybe the whiplash wouldn’t have been so severe and I could have transitioned to something better before getting stuck.

My worry is that so many people around me - from all walks of life and across a wide range of pay scales - have a similarly unhealthy relationship with their work and would experience the same whiplash.

My deeper worry is that the rate of technological progress is far outpacing any efforts to implement a less toxic economy and culture, and that such changes to economy and culture must necessarily be gradual to avoid massive societal upheaval and chaos.

Ultimately I want to work on big world-impacting problems whether I’m getting paid for it or not. I know this is possible, but spent most of my early life training for the toxic work culture that burned me out.

I think we need off-ramps and on-ramps, not cliff dives.

> I don't believe either of our individual experiences are really a good predictor of universal human experience in this area. Do you?

No, and I said as much in my comment. My point was not that my experience is universal, but that I have direct experience with the failure mode of such an arrangement. Am I 50% of the population? 75? 5? I don’t know. But as I went though it, I met more people who’d gone through something similar, and I learned a lot about myself that made me realize my previous imagination about a life without work were mostly fantasies. Again, this isn’t to say there aren’t productive ways to navigate it. Just that the ways I imagined this working were very different from reality.

The bottom line is that we don’t know what such an arrangement would bring about at mass scale, and if people are more likely to have an experience like yours or like mine. There’s probably a spectrum of experiences between them. I just think we should approach such a future thoughtfully and carefully.

Diving in head first with a “let’s see what happens” attitude seems dangerous and ill advised.

> No, and I said as much in my comment.

You had that disclaimer but most of the rest of the comment was about your prediction that most people would be affected in the same way. Some friendly feedback for your future writing on the subject, I guess.

That’s fair, and I edited “most” to “many” shortly after I wrote it because the truth is that I don’t know what exact proportion of people will have the same issues. I had hoped the extensive context throughout the rest of my comments made that position clear.

I do feel confident that the number is higher than some of us think. Certainly I did not expect this to unfold in my own life, and through the experience I became aware of the many others who’d gone through something similar and were similarly caught off guard.

All of this will hinge on personal upbringing, background, support systems, life experiences, locale, etc. At some point I hope to write in more detail about the factors in my own life that I believe led me here after I’ve gotten fully to the “other side” of the experience.

What I find so incredibly frustrating about comments like this is the assumption that this is how it has to be. Human liberation is a bad idea because you had a bad experience during sabbatical and that’s the way it has to be.

People and society adapt.

This is not what I took away from the experience or what I’m trying to communicate with my comment.

I’ve elaborated in various sibling comments, but my point is closer to this: regardless of what is possible, many people simply don’t have the skills for a rapidly and drastically altered social arrangement.

To your point, people can gain those skills. Society will adapt. But the worrying thing to me is the rate of change. Whatever we can imagine about a future in which we’re not bound to our jobs, there is also the harsh reality that we have to collectively agree about an awful lot of things to get there, and that agreement isn’t happening at the same rate as technological progress.

If anything, some forms of “progress” (social media) are grinding healthy collaboration and agreement to a halt while big tech ushers in a new era of tools despite the fact that we haven’t adapted to the last major advancements.

None of this is assuming this is how things must be. It’s more about the very real problems that will come with such a transition and the fact that we’re already doing a pretty bad job of ushering in such a future in a way that is actually beneficial to people.

We're currently going backwards in terms of progress and you're worried about going too far forward too quickly.

Progress is not evenly distributed, nor are all forms of progress beneficial.

In my mind, it is exactly because of the areas of regression that other areas of progress are problematic if we don’t place enough focus on solving the new problems such progress creates.

e.g. many of the worst aspects of modern social media discourse boil down to people with an extremely limited understanding of complex problems believing in overly simplistic solutions and forming strong world views based on that lack of understanding.

Much of the technological progress recently involves abstraction on top of abstraction on top of abstraction making extremely complex things appear simple. The further down this road we go, the further the technology moves the average person out of contact with the underlying reality.

Push a button and shoes show up at your door. Nevermind the thousands or hundreds of thousands of people involved in making that happen or the many harms that occur along the way ranging from ecosystem destruction to child labor.

I don’t see the concerns I have about certain forms of progress as having any bearing on the areas of obvious regression. I’d even argue that some of the progress has directly caused that regression. The law of unintended consequences and all that.

> Many people would not know how to live under such a system

People will learn just like they learned how to live under the alternate system.

I do think people will learn/adapt. I’m in the middle of that now. The question/concern is more about what happens during that learning process, and whether or not society has structures in place to facilitate it at scale.

e.g. my journey involved quite a bit of professional psychological help, and I feel lucky that I found good care given the shortage of good care in this category.

This is literally me, but Im half way through year two and I feel like the ground is slowly getting thinner beneath me.

The thing I would tell my former self is this: pivot now. Waiting may make things harder. Don’t assume it will sort itself out. And if you can find a good therapist, it can be extremely helpful.

Actively seek out something that provides structure and consistency, even if that’s not work. Something that keeps you in regular contact with other people.

I had started to look into various volunteering opportunities but didn’t take action before my major slide. In retrospect I think I’d have been better off if I did.

Just get a child and you have more than enough to do for roughly twenty years.

You have to retire at some point so prepare for it. Some people do indeed not cope well.

Absolutely. But most retirement planning doesn’t cover 40-60 years of time. Most retirement planning also assumes a period of time when a person is gradually losing their ability to fully engage with society.

It’s a whole different ballgame when the period of time involves a person’s “peak” years. Many people have a drive that they haven’t yet satisfied in their 20s/30s/40s. This isn’t to say this drive can’t be channeled into something other than a traditional job. I’m just saying we don’t currently have societal structures and norms such that an entire population will know what to do.

Who is "we"? The entire human race?

Expecting all humans across different cultures and languages to come together and figure out basic income for 9 billion people is absurd. This kind of cooperation never happened and probably never will. People are completely unable to cooperate at the massive scale this requires, let alone solve far smaller challenges like mitigating outbreaks or making an effort to avert climate change.

"We" is not a thing.

We as in, it's not a social cooperation thing, many people's individual moral ethics make it so they themselves would be uncomfortable with the idea of not working to earn a living. Currently, society as a whole generally believes that it's each individual person's prerogative to find paying work and most people don't really examine this belief. There's nothing to cooperate on yet.

I think the idea of a society where work is optional and people having their needs met by the society they live in is actually well explored. It's a Utopia. The problem is human nature is competitive and just being provided with everything you need to live, even being given ample time to create art and enjoy life, is not enough for many people. Utopian ideas all look great on paper but when meeting reality you cannot build Utopia around greed and elitism and you can't abolish them either.

The first step towards this is a UN resolution.

That's an interesting take. Is there any historical precedent for an international change that started with a UN resolution? Because my cynical take is that UN resolutions are typically either ineffective, or made post-hoc.

It's difficult, but not impossible. "We" decided to offer everyone a covid vaccine and achieved that.

And as a result of "we" being divided, we have the resurgence of many vaccine preventable diseases, because that achievement was flat out rejected by part of humanity.

I wonder what part of that was actual rejection of the vaccines vs a rejection of collective action itself as an idea.

The rejection itself was a collective action. It wasn't passive, anti-vaxxers did work spreading propaganda, protesting and undermining vaccination efforts. They made it a part of their identity and culture.

If it was a rejection of anything, it was of any assumption of good faith on the part of either government or scientific institutions. Why that happened, as quickly and thoroughly and as polarized along clear partisan lines as it was, is a mystery.

> If it was a rejection of anything, it was of any assumption of good faith on the part of either government or scientific institutions. Why that happened, as quickly and thoroughly and as polarized along clear partisan lines as it was, is a mystery.

It isn't a mystery, it was the bullshit and lies that happened the first month of covid in USA, many people then stopped listening even when the bullshit and lies stopped. I remember the cases in New York exploding and the local democrat told people to continue as normal since its nothing to worry about, and that masks doesn't prevent spread so don't go buy masks, that was how it all started.

They say they had to tell those lies to save resources for those who needs it, but that made people stop trusting them and that counts for so much more. I hope they learned their lesson, but likely they didn't as they never said "Sorry we lied to you, we shouldn't have done that".

Except if you understand they were being misleading, and you understand why, you also understand Covid was a real problem and that there were serious infrastructure and logistics problems that had to be dealt with. You get angry with the government for fumbling the effort, but you still get vaccinated. That doesn't justify believing Fauci and Biden cooked up Covid in a lab or that the vaccines were spiked with microchips or that masks give you brain cancer or half the stuff antivaxxers actually wound up claiming.

People literally formed resistance organizations and were warning of a global fascist takeover, we were entering an eternal police state in which the unvaccinated would become a slave underclass and if you didn't have your vaccine card you would get shot dead in the street.

All of it went far beyond simple mistrust in the government's PR.

You forgot the flip side of the predictions: that the vaccinated would end up bleeding out in the streets. I believe there were a large number of such predictions, which should have already happened.

I think this only strengthens your observation that anti-vaxxing went far beyond simple mistrust.

The idea that we no longer need labor is preposterous. Where are the machines to take care of children or the sick, or to build and maintain housing?

What kind of science fiction world do you think you live in?

The idea that those jobs can only be done by desperate individuals so society needs desperate individuals is your logic here. I am not sure I can even counter it, I lack the imagination to see an alternative.

Helping people is not desperate work. It’s meaningful.

Sure, but one shift as a nurse in a hospital will open your eyes to just how difficult a job that can be, and not one many people would do unless "forced" to.

I’m not sure what your scare quotes mean, but nurses don’t work for free and traveling nurses in particular make good money.

“Forced labor” originally meant things like slave labor, but some people have it backwards.

I think anyone will agree that being able to walk away is important for negotiations. How much you’re paid has little to do with that. Having alternative job offers or the savings to do without a job for a while is more important.

There's many incentives encouraging people to work in America. Many of them are positive ones (pride, a sense of community, ambition) and many of them are negative (inability to pay rent, health insurance, food otherwise).

A lot of terrible jobs are required in our society to be done by people from negative encouragement. The belief that all jobs can be done purely through positive encouragement I think is potentially naive. Maybe nurse was a bad example but people who work from this negative encouragement are in many ways "forced" to.

For illustration some of the worst farm labor jobs in America are done by illegal immigrants, and it's not obvious legal citizens would do those jobs at any rate that makes economic sense. The economic engine that gets us food in our grocery store runs on their desperation.

I broadly agree that the economy works that way, but I’m somewhat doubtful that “running on desperation” is quite the right way to describe it. It seems a bit reductive.

Consider joining the military. Most Americans would never consider enlisting. There are people who consider possibly getting shot at or killed to be worth it. Maybe some of them were desperate when they joined, but often not.

Similarly, people who decide to immigrate to the US have a variety of motivations. Is hoping for a better life desperate? It depends.

Sometimes people regret their choices in life, which means they had choices and the other choice wasn’t obviously worse, in retrospect.

More generally, there are a lot of ways that people can get into situations that feel like a trap, and a bad job could be one of them.

I don't think I've ever met a nurse who felt well compensated for their work, but they continued to do it because they were passionate about providing care to those who needed it.

They’re not suggesting no-one has to work. They’re suggesting that no-one has to live without necessities like food, shelter or medical insecurity.

"For free" implies no forced labor or time commitment. So yes, they're suggesting no-one has to work.

If everyone has a basic life for free, how do we decide who still has to harvest crops?

> We have enough technology to offer a basic life for everyone for free

Not literally "everyone". Someone still has to make the food you eat and the house you sleep in.

That's what automation is for. And there will always be people who want a much more expensive lifestyle than a "basic life".

That's the point, there's no automated solution to my laundry but apparently there is now an automated solution for my musical passions.