What Would People Do With Themselves in a Post-Work Society?

Personally I consider the prospect of a post-work society to be fairly remote from the standpoint of 2025. While the exceedingly slow technological progress in almost every area having to do with the performance of physical work that really does make the modern world go round, with all that implies about the need for people to go on doing much of the work is certainly an issue, the real stumbling block is political. A society in which elite opinion is decisive, and treats the idea of economic and social rights with contempt; and which operates according to an economic model that can scarcely be bettered for making life as expensive as possible; is probably incapable of the necessary reforms--for example, establishing a Universal Basic Income (UBI) guaranteeing at least the minimum required to live in a reasonably decent and safe fashion. Still, it may be that I am wrong about society's possibilities as they now stand, all as one can never be sure that society as we know it will not transform itself into something else. More consequentially for the present, as those of us who have found interest in science fiction, historical counterfactual and futurology well know, thought-experiments about even unlikely-seeming possibilities can produce all sorts of insight with an interest far beyond the testing of a specific hypothesis.

The result is that I am not sure it is completely pointless to, in thinking about the idea of a post-work society, consider what people would do with their lives in a post-work society. Those of conventional mind, especially if they are of a certain age, will picture the youth of the country and the world taking advantage living in their parents' basements, or maybe little apartments, playing video games all day long, and thunder against the prospect as reason why such a society should never be allowed to come into being. However, I would argue that this traditionalist disapproval of the uses that some may make of the unprecedented freedom that UBI would afford them in determining the use of their time is not in itself an argument against that freedom here as against any other area, other factors necessarily warranting consideration before one seeks to restrict that freedom--that this usage would be so pernicious as to merit forbidding it. So far as I am concerned there are far worse things that people might do than sit at home playing video games--and I don't just mean abusing drugs or committing crimes. I also mean their doing a great many highly esteemed jobs that actually destroy value--many jobs in advertising or investment banking, for example. Lest there be any doubt about the matter, yes, I am flatly saying that on the basis of the evidence any rational personal has to judge that a homebound video gamer who is not in the work force represents at worst a far smaller deduction from society's value creation than do those much-admired folks on Madison Avenue and Wall Street that the conventional so admire--perhaps by orders of magnitude in comparison with the high-salaried and massively value-destroying "meritocrats" of Manhattan simply on the basis of that one calculation.

Indeed, it is possible that the balance is even more heavily in their favor than that one calculation indicates. Consider, for example, how much less one consumes when they are not working--as we see when considering the expenditure on clothes, meals out, transport, child care, etc. encouraged and often necessitated by a regular job. One may add to this that the relatively leisured gamer has the opportunity to take care of themselves--and possibly lighten the burden they place on society in comparison with their "contributing" peers. After all, part of the "bullshitization" of the economy consists in the extent to which so many of those who do even valuable jobs are essentially cleaning up messes that shouldn't have been made in the first place. There is how in a society where people have less stress and more time on their hands they may better watch what they eat, exercise and otherwise lead healthier lives that put less strain on the "health care system" that has become such a burden to society. One may add to this, too, that any Universal Basic Income deserving of the name will afford them enough to let them get a small, functional apartment. Staying at home instead they could very easily contribute to their parents' household budget instead, leaving them better off, while being in a position to help out in other ways--something that should not be underappreciated in a society which is aging and increasingly atomized. (Certainly it is better for the aged, as well as the young or infirm, to have a carer looking after them for more than just a paycheck.) Indeed, contrary to our ultra-conformist media's delight in flogging stories of adults who in living at home live parasitically on their parents, those who do live at home usually do contribute to the well-being of their households.

All that said I think the possibility that a generation of people would really choose to "stay home playing video games." I imagine that many would, given the chance, find the way to other activities--in cases more conventionally work-like, in others less so, in cases more successfully making a contribution, in others less so, all as the possibility would exist of their on the whole, again, leaving the world better rather than worse off in the process. Indeed, I imagine that where achieving the best possible outcome is concerned one thing that we may keep in mind is educating the young not just for work the way we have so long been doing--alas, training them to be the "talking tools" of those who employ them, with all the dehumanization frankly involved in that, especially in the age of the machine--but for leisure as well. Indeed, it may be well to begin thinking about that even without a post-work society necessarily seeming likely to emerge soon, simply as a corrective to the damage done by the former type of education so many have deemed a necessity of modern life.