What would it be like if no-one had to work for a living? Even with advances in AI, this seems unlikely to happen for at least the next decade: AIs can’t paint walls. However, it’s fun to think about. Clara Collier has done so and written about it in Asterisk Magazine. She thinks one useful precedent could be the European aristocrats of past centuries:
They did not work for pay; they certainly did not see work as a source of meaning. It’s certainly true that some of them had real obligations, like governing or killing each other, but court life in the age of absolutism is as close to a purely relational world as anything I can think of.
We also know a great deal about what mattered most to them and how they chose to occupy their time. Aristocrats tend to be sensitive social observers who are also extremely self-involved, which makes them talented and prolific memoirists. The most famous work in the genre, rightfully, is the memoirs of Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon.
Saint-Simon was a courtier at the Versailles of Louis XIV. This was the wealthiest and most brilliant court in Europe, a center of unparalleled refinement in aesthetics and manners; according to Voltaire, another courtier, it was the greatest of the four great ages of light, surpassing Athens, Rome, and Florence at their peaks.
It might seem surprising, then, that Saint-Simon himself is dull, petty, anti-intellectual, and obsessed with nuances of heredity and precedence to the exclusion of every other human concern […] I’ve read a lot of aristocratic memoirs, and all of them are like this.
Many of us are trying to elevate ourselves above others. Currently, the most straightforward way to do this is by having the most money. If money is less of a concern, we will strive for other forms of societal status, like the aristocratic inmates of European courts and their palace intrigues. To some extent, this is already happening with politics. People seem to care more about which party, and which fraction of which party, is in power, rather than about policy outcomes.
Nehaveigur 