Working for the Pure Pleasure of It — An Alternative to Dystopia
Re-arrange your perspective; the shift is coming.
Imagine waking up in the morning and being truly content with life.
The year is 2062.
It’s a little cold outside and the dew on the window is starting to stream down as the first beams of sunlight slowly condense it on your panoramic prefab home window. You hear the local wildlife twittering away outside of your bedroom window and you can smell the moisture from recent rain drifting in from outside.
The petrichor consumes you completely.
You stretch and rise from your bed….. it’s time to get out into the fields and pick apples!
You quickly grab the cup of coffee that was already prepared and waiting for you steaming inside the cup as you rounded the corner to your kitchen. Your automated kitchen always has a cup for you.
You stumble on your Roomba on the way out, but it’s ok, it comes back to clean up the little spill you just made.
You head out the door of your three bedroom prefab modern efficient home — not a care in the world— all your bills are paid, your house has no mortgage, and you have no financial stress.
Your self-driving car opens to welcome you, and your journey to the Orchard is about 15 minutes or so.
What do you do for a living?
Well, nothing really.
You have a degree in biology and you spend a lot of time out in nature cataloguing and studying for local companies and for the government, but because you take low payment for it, it’s not really something you do for money, it’s something you do because you believe it needs to be done, and you have a passion to make sure it gets done. It’s seasonal, so it doesn’t occupy all of your time.
You also love volunteering to help maintain local trails and camp grounds, but this doesn’t pay.
You love to write and you write about biology and adventure in your free time on Medium and Substack and you earn a cool $1000+ per month just for sharing your research and perspectives. But, this also is pleasure for you, not something you do because you are required to make ends meet.
In your free time you decide to pick apples for local private Orchards in the summers, at a rate of $10 per hour — not because you are desperate and can’t find better pay, but because you enjoy the work, find it stimulating and almost therapeutic to pick Apples. The bigger farms use robots now, but the smaller farms still love the human touch and look for it.
There is no shortage of labor, so you aren’t working full-time and everyone picking apples with you is mostly there for the enjoyment of it so there is no fierce competition for full time roles. Those who want to work full time, can, and those who do not, are seasonal help.
In apple season, you help harvesting apples; when it’s time for grapes and blueberries, you help pick grapes and blueberries. You just love helping, and the perks of working in the fields (endless ugly apples to take home, and free blueberries).
Next week, you are going to hike to a lake and camp for a few days, without asking a boss for permission. You didn’t plan it, you just felt like doing it, and so your plans are now re-arranged spontaneously.
From the eyes of the casual time-traveler peering into our lives from their “1990s Goggles”…… we must be independently wealthy or something. This town must all be retired investors or something.
Why in the heck are things so easy for them, and why aren’t they stressing over money?
On your mobile device, they see you glance down and check a few messages every now and then, and what they don’t see — is a steady stream of income happening — from your autonomous online stores, and from your mobile-mining crypto accessories that track your footsteps and pay you for data. Apps which communicate with health related apps, and provide an exchangeable cryptocurrency for that information, all while keeping your doctor up to date and in the loop.
You also have crypto bots trading for you 24/7, and you get notifications when you capture profits.
From birth, you also had a interest-bearing Defi account set up for you that used web3 technologies to convert data into money you can’t touch until you turn 18.
Universal Basic Income is somewhat irrelevant because “Web3” has made income possible from every angle, which is now activated for everyone shortly after birth as a new form of non-tax based societal support systems.
Most people now are born in a time where resources are no longer as scarce as they used to be, many labor intensive jobs are optional, and where we are practically able to retire by the time you are 18, but because humans would be existentially bored if we are doing nothing — we all simply pursue the things that resonate with our souls, without need to makes ends meet, all while profiting very nicely anyway if we chose to pursue business …..as pleasure.
Then…. imagine someone who works a job that “no one else wants”, purely because they love it.
Hard to believe?
It’s true.
What if I told you I’ve spoken to a lifetime plumber who told me that she was fascinated with pipe fitting ever since she was a kid, she tried to be a welder, but didn’t like it, so she went into plumbing, and every day is like playing pipe-fitter legos for her?
No really. Allegedly, she truly enjoys it.
https://www.sharkbite.com/us/en/resources/videos/a-career-in-plumbing-kim-yeagleys-story
She is not the only one.
Imagine a world where everything that needs to be done, still gets done, but is done by people seeking the work for completely different reasons, or by robots who can do it 10x better?
A world where those jobs that “people don’t want”, which cannot be effectively handled by machines, end up paying more for those who want them, but also end up being filled by people who desire the job, for the pleasure and pride of doing it.
For the joy of exercise, for the joy of fulfillment, for many varied reasons, just not purely for profit…….and gasp…….the world still turns.
Sound a little too …..Utopian?
Maybe….
Call me a hopeless optimist.
Call me an abundance junkie.
Call me a utopian.
Call me whatever you will, but this reality of income abundance is just around the corner for many.
It’s already underway for me.
What about you?
Thank you for reading!
Until next time….
Onward and Upward Everybody!
-Chris