I have been off work for over 6 months now. I have been doing so many projects, and exploring so many places, working out, eating healthy, learning, and spending very little money doing so. I actually even quit smoking pot after doing it daily for 10 years. It's been amazing, and I'd rather never go back to work. I don't get how people can get so bored. There's so much to do and see.
From my lived experience you are an outlier. Potentially an extreme one at that.
Where I grew up the people who didn’t work almost universally turned into consumers of everything and creators of basically nothing. The exceptions were retirees who had a lifetime if work experience prior to their idle years. For those folks it was gardening and other similar hobbies that provided meaning but not much output for society as a whole.
I think if you offered the entire population the ability to do no work other than what they felt like doing, exceedingly few people would be motivated to do the needful. A few more would be motivated to do things like create art and otherwise contribute back to other people but I am thinking along the lines of the 80/20 rule here.
I think our future if we ever figured out automation and UBI looks a lot like Wall-E vs some sort of utopia. In fact I believe that sort of setup is as close to a utopian society as I can imagine being realistic.
I did apartment maintenance for a place where about half the recipients had paid for rent, utilities, and bare necessities provided by the government. It was easy to play the odds and know which apartment was which the moment you stepped foot into one. It’s not a perfect correlation to what UBI would look like for many reasons, but it’s closer than the average upper middle class suburbanite imagines people will act like if given the opportunity.
What projects? You are starting from a completely different baseline than the average hypothetical UBI recipient.
I think UBI advocates may have a point once you're 2-3 generations into some sort of UBI system. But bootstrapping that system is not possible, most people will revert to do nothing of value to society, no projects, nothing.
I generally agree, but I think for some of the most interesting problems in computer science you need resources that only companies can provide and thats basically work.
After free UNIX and Linux became available on affordable home computers, I found it was no longer necessary to be at a company to do interesting projects. That was before 1995.
People can find other things to do than work for a wage. I don’t get what your original objection is about when you yourself work even though you don’t have to.
Some local volunteer organizations seem to only have people 60+ years of age.
