What would a world without work be like where everybody has enough money not to work?

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Either depressing or a paradise, and it all depends on culture and human nature.

Communist societies are nothing new, it’s not too hard to convince everybody to pool all the resources, at least for a little while. It might not happen immediately, your pet society might last quite a long time before it happens, but eventually, human nature will rear its ugly head.

Mere security won’t be enough for everyone. People don’t just want to be safe, they also want prestige. The nasty thing about prestige is that it’s a zero sum game. If everyone is special, then no one is. You can only have prestige if someone else doesn’t have it.

There’s a pecking order in every single human social system. These pecking orders are inherently unstable. People deploy peaceful means to get what they want, but when peace breaks down, warfare breaks out.

War is awful because it threatens security. So a world in which everyone has enough resources to not have to work will eventually succumb to a war in which those resources are redirected to the cause of waging war.

Then there won’t be enough resources in order to keep everyone from having to work.

Even if we can prevent war, there’s another think keeping this vision from becoming reality. Stupidity. People who might not be convinced to divert their living resources to war, might be convinced to part with them for selfish reasons. Selfish reasons means the aforementioned prestige.

So if you get on the government dole but trade those government resources away for a shot at an even better life than ‘mere’ subsistence, and large numbers of people decide to do this, then we’re right back to large numbers of people not having enough to live.

Making it so people couldn’t even do that would make for a pretty depressing society.