Is this really so hard to figure out? Very few people would do things which are useful to keep civilization running if they have a choice. Look at what people do with their leisure time - watch commercial TV, play video games, look at nonsense on Facebook. It wouldn't be pretty.
> watch commercial TV, play video games, look at nonsense on Facebook. It wouldn't be pretty
Because that's all most people can do after 8-10 hours (+ commute) of soul-draining work, and then some household chores. Let's not assume that this is the default of human leisure just because it's all people have energy for after hard day of work.
NEETs might provide a strong example that this is the default of human leisure. In my experience most NEETs lament their lack of motivation. It's possible that their depression is a result of adverse societal pressure, but I posit that most humans lack the ability to structure their time without an external motivator.
It's often said that pain is the best teacher, but it is also common to refer to "the carrot or the stick". Pleasure provides motivation just as great as pain. Lately on Hacker News people have discussed addiction to smart-phones, referring to the dopamine hit resulting from notifications. We also see this with television series, where people will spend hours of free time binge-watching a show. It may well be that we can no longer control ourselves.
A recent science-fiction piece[1] references this phenomena: "I read pdfs of outlandish philosophers, but I do it while frantically checking for notifications" and "Normally I just fulfill my smart contracts and go back to reading Deleuze and Guattari, by which I mean I play first person shooters while the pdf is up on my other monitor".
Hikikomori provide another interesting example, perhaps without the social pressure; although I admit that I'm not very knowledgeable about Japanese society. It's been too long since I've read them; but the books "Hikikomori: Adolescence Without End" and "Welcome to the NHK" may provide some insight.
While I would like to think that humans are intrinsically motivated to _do_, experience shows me that most people are content to merely consume. Technology engineered to keep us scrolling only seems to exasperate the issue.
> While I would like to think that humans are intrinsically motivated to _do_, experience shows me that most people are content to merely consume. Technology engineered to keep us scrolling only seems to exasperate the issue.
Reminds me of the concept of interpassivity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpassivity. We maybe be intrinsically motivated to _do_, but we have developed technology that can satiate this desire, e.g. watching someone else play video games on twitch.tv.
First off, that sounds like baseless speculation. Second, there might be a causal relation between lacking motivation/interests and being jobless. It's not a representative sample of the population at large.
Jobless people aren't often just jobless. They're stay-at-home moms. They're people on disability. They're people with medical or mental conditions. They're people stuck in welfare trap - they get just enough money to make it not profitable to work (they'd lose it if they went to work, but no entry-level job will pay them more than the amount they get from welfare), but not enough to support any creative hobby. Or they have jobs - on the grey/black market, so that they can get both benefits and some shit untaxed pay.
Absolutely, and there is also a perceived risk by many people that if they become to active or vested in a non-work activity that it will negatively impact their source of income.
If you wanted to remain living in your ideal world, you would make adjustments to your life for the sole purpose of maintaining your lifestyle instead of just thinking "meh, someone else will do it".
I have to think if this were built into how we lived for hundreds of generations, then your mindset would even change from "maintaining my lifestyle" to "this is what we do to keep everyone happy".
I'm not a hardcore socialist either. I'm almost the opposite. I like the idea that if someone puts in a lot of effort, they should have a lot of success. I have no sympathy for people who want to just watch TV and expect to be carried by society. But, at the same time, I would much rather live in a world where everyone was happy doing what they love, and everything just worked out without the concept of money.
The world you describe, that's the problem with all those wishful thinking like communism. Just a tiny detail, like 'if people wouldn't be selfish but work for greater good', and all would be better. On that I agree.
Where we would probably disagree is how realistic this is - to me, on truly global scale (not some isolated ie swiss/swedish experiment but places with properly f*cked up work mentality and life attitude like russia or any post-war country), it's very, very far from reality. I won't live long enough to see even a glimpse of what we discuus.
Not that it makes me anyhow happy, but it's important to have a realistic view on important variables. Everybody has a dark side. I've seen even the best and brightest and hard workers to slack badly once they lose motivation, ie changing jobs. Better have a system that accepts these flaws and still extracts value for society even in non-ideal way, rather than working with some ideal human being that is simply not out there.
a) Why is that a bad thing? It's bad for the people themselves but arguably it's not terrible for society as a whole. Better than those people going out and getting into trouble, for instance.
b) I imagine that in a world without meaningful work, having meaningful hobbies might be seen as trendy. Just like eating poorly and being unfit signal low social status today, being a media-consuming couch potato would be considered low-class.
Well, if the world we're considering is one where magic provides all our necessities plus a bountiful UBI, then I agree with you. But I didn't think that that was the world we were discussing.
