Oh! I've been waiting for an article like this for such a long time, and you wrote it brilliantly! For me the way a happy retired person lives her life is the way we should all live. My father retired when he was 54. Now he is 82 and has been so happy doing what he likes to do and with so much health.. I "retired" around my 40's and been doing many new and exciting things since. I don't understand why many people think that the ones who.do not work in an office are not worth it. The people who really live her life and is present are the ones who can create art, who can take care of others or the environment, the ones who smile more to others, who can guide the younger ones to help them. I also think that AI will help us to free ourselves from the slavery of useless work.
Sure, but this is indeed the optimistic scenario. And Dario’s later essay is bricking it because the machines wont just work instead of us, for us, but plausibly for themselves, which makes us not just redundant in our own lives, unless we can understand the nature of true freedom, as you rightly say, but probably extinct.
IF we have the chance. A sliver of a mistake and it is all over. I must say I don’t fancy our chances — too many bad actors who seem bent on god knows what. But obvs there is no point thinking like this. Certainly we must plan for the optimistic scenario —
The wealthy build AI models to explore new markets, call it "disruption" and socialize whatever "collateral damage" they can't privatize for profit. Structurally, it's a Friday at the office of banal capitalism. The server farm is owned, the model weights are proprietary, the inference cluster sits on a balance sheet. Automation doesn't detach disruption from ownership simply because labor input shrinks. It shifts leverage to whoever owns compute, compute follows capital, capital allocates labor income and that income pays for your rent, your food and your toothbrush. Slash income from that chain and you're back to the old pavement. Not with "abundance". With exclusion.
Now, imagine scaling a post-work idyll to billions of excluded people with no income stream, no stake in the productive base, no "skin in the game". Zero labor claim, zero ownership claim. WWCD: What Would Capital Do? "Restructure" and "consolidate". Sink unprofitable segments, and double down on the most defensible margins. Fiduciary logic, the stuff of villains.
The secondary effect is less abstract: if billions become economically idle without guaranteed access to goods, they won't suddenly wake up as marrow-sucking philosopher-gardeners. They'll ration consumption, cannibalize savings and internalize decline as normal: the same picture of deferred hope we're already used to. When the pie's finally shaved down to crumbs? The AKs come out. On a long enough timeline, less competition radicalizes generations: when creative destruction outpaces creative absorption and when leisure expands without income, restlessness either expresses as innovation, or devolves into grievance. Corporations either recruit that energy into new roles and ownership models, or exclusion runs riot until the welfare state collapses.
Now, what?
Read the fine print: a surplus of involuntary leisure, of unused labor potential with nowhere to go, is a ticking time bomb. When resentment scales, institutions expand: prisons, courts, psych wards. More "governance", a.k.a. more surveillance, a.k.a. more "compliance". From the state's perspective, an idle mass with no purchasing power is a massive policy nail to hammer. That's where your fantasy completely breaks down. A social contract with no social reciprocity needs more management and more management needs "coercive capacity". Language shifts to "pacification", but Leviathan remains. Suddenly, the un-working class is no longer a banal item of capitalist redistribution but a systemic threat to cohesion. Suddenly, with less creative than destruction and with more leisure than leverage, all that accumulated resentment turns kinetic. Scale that across billions and the state responds with "force" &, then, suddenly: war.
Are you ready for that? You and what layabout army? History has run that script before. Tooth decay is a metaphor until no one can afford a dentist. Then, it becomes infection, and infection spreads. Social rot is just decay at scale, and even if decay is slow and managerially polite, the state won't dissolve just because work has. State violence doesn't bow down to utopia. Only you do, and efficiency will never claim as many bodies as romantic contempt for security has.
Any attempt to sever large-scale production from incentive structures has led to stagnation, oligarchy, or oppression. Does history even offer one reliable case of spontaneously occurring universal leisure? The lesson is that banal distribution can't be an afterthought. "I contribute, therefore I eat" is crude (and morally thin), but it stabilizes expectations even as capital and ownership remain concentrated. Eliminate contribution without guaranteed claims on output, without socializing the subsequent wave of collateral damage, and you engineer a society of mutually assured redundancy. Is that the road to eudaimonia? Or a dying pond where entropy compounds? If you and your friends become overnight retirees without a redesigned distribution mechanism for surplus, who captures the surplus? If labor costs buckle under the weight of unpriced demand and underfunded production, what anchors value to effort or entitlement to output? No ruling party would ever survive a post-work transition without first solving distribution along the productivity curve. If productivity rises but labor income collapses, what stops workers from dispersing? Try selling that and watch the ballots turn. Ignore the ballots, and the layabouts start looking for meaning in death. Yours, not theirs.
How do you plan to defend your life and liberty, then, with no means to arm yourself?
AI infrastructure runs on chip plants, lithium mines, rare-earth supply chains, undersea cables and energy grids that remain limited and geo-economically fragile. It's an imperialistic and extractive system, no doubt, but one that leverages scarcity to grow the pie. Capitalism is just the distribution algo. Why would it erase scarcity when it can price it, monetize our access to it, and reinvest the returns into more growth for welfare? Abundance doesn't float on charity vapors, nor does the machine pause for solidarity. A firm that replaces 70% of its workforce with inference servers will not sunset itself into contemplation or retirement. It will lower its prices, aggressively expand market share, and pressure competitors. Competitors will automate or collapse. Workers will retrain, migrate, or exit. Creative destruction will accelerate, barriers to entry will harden around capital and data moats, and if you happen to be displaced as well, you won't be gently ferried to a cabin along Thoreau's pond. You'll commute to an ever-tightening arena that demands fewer humans for more specialized roles. You won't work less by default: you'll compete harder by necessity. As long as energy and materials remain finite, and as long as supply chains are politically contested, work is a binding condition, and population structure becomes fate. Demography is destiny.
Now, push that premise forward: the most materially secure societies are also the ones that exhibit the lowest fertility rates. Work grants autonomy, but autonomy reduces birth rates. If you're waiting for post-scarcity to refill the nursery, you'll be waiting "in limine" forever. Comfort expands choice, which includes the choice to postpone or forgo reproduction altogether. Automated tasks don't abruptly remove the need for mating markets, or flatten status hierarchies. You rightly frame work-identity as a cage, but less work and more play still makes you a dull boy. It doesn't automatically yield flourishing and meaning and civilization still extracts the bulk of its meaning from coordinated production. Shrink the population and, at some point, it won't be able to produce any of the things you find so meaningful. Now, what? More symbolic stasis? A slower spiral of managed decline? A museum-civilization that curates its own dystopic afterglow?
We've been rehearsing that condition for decades. Infinite scroll, hyper-personalized feeds, dopamine loops that'll soon be tuned to your nervous system. When our attention is the commodity, there's no economy in the world that would power down for more "degrowth". We compete for more relevance, more identity and visibility and more income to audition for more bullshit jobs. Even with AI-tier efficiency, there's no free lunch at macroeconomic scale. Your freedom is still the freedom to starve at civilization's table. Your choice is still the choice to compete or be excluded. Otherwise, the trade-off is as clear as a technocrat's utopia: "You will own nothing and be happy".
Yes, the house of capitalist realism wins again. It sets the rules of the game and scripts the imagination of the players. Machines don't abolish markets, only capital can restructure them. AI doesn't dissolve capital, only bloody revolutions do. And before those tables turn, leisure will be converted into yet another instrument for profit-maximizing extraction. A coping ritual for isolated men and lonely women who live as disconnected, utopia-deprived atoms.
WWCD?
It's already cornered the market for utopia: all ideas, even the most contradictory ones, and all solutions, even the most "alt" or "punk" or fringe ones, can be repackaged by the logic of consumption as our appetites have no thinkable ceiling. Is that the delivery mechanism for the "marrow of days"? Rationed choice, a managed feed, and passivity sold back to us as freedom?
Slogans about the end of history or the inevitability of leisure are seductive, but sedative lullabies. "History is over, please recline" is the bittersweet whisper that turns would-be revolutionaries into bureaucrat reformers once they trade their scarves and berets for credentials and social credits. Any vision of the future, even the most recklessly defiant or optimistic, can be metabolized by consumption and absorbed by the system with the ease of a kitchen sponge. In the end, the question isn't whether automation arrives but who'll own the curve once AGI does, and whether we'll have rewritten the social contract before the curve has rewritten us. There's no frictionless, meadow-bound third way inside a finite, growth-driven system that co-opts everything and everyone in sight. If you want a post-work future that doesn't metastasize into surveillance and coercion, you have to solve distribution before displacement peaks. That kind of adaptation may be quieter than dreaming, but it outperforms loud aspiration every time. The machine isn't here to tuck you in. Darwin never eulogized comfort: that dream will end just as all civilizations do. Smaller than promised, angrier than expected, and confused by the very systems that made their comfort possible. Efficiency, for all its flaws, will continue to collect its due in patients, prisoners, domesticated revolutionaries, and dinosaurs waiting for the asteroid. Which one are you? It's a lot easier to disappear than it is to adapt and evolve.
I lived through a mini retirement stage from 2021 to 2025 and I identified completely with your description of eudaimonia. I flourished during this time and now in 2026 I am using the learnings from my lived experience to design my life more intentionally.
I am not as optimistic as you about the future, but if your vision comes through, I will be so happy flourishing again.
I love this vision and agree completely with the idea that we are here for purposes other than jobs. What I find difficult to imagine is how we will be able to fund our lives in this futuristic scenario? Is AI going to do the jobs and then put money in our bank accounts because it doesn’t need it? I’d love someone to help me envision how this works?
This, I'm afraid, is the real problem: our employers won't simply keep sending us paychecks if we're not employed anymore. What we'll most likely be doing with our newly found leisure time is scrounging for food in trash containers in front of the mansions of the rich. But I'll be happy to be proven wrong.
I am so with you on the spirit - of ai giving us freedom to experience meaning and purpose. I just can’t see how we can erase thousands of years of social hierarchy (see social dominance theory). In my late 60’s I’m spending ($$$) “retirement” getting a PhD (in social psychology) for the joy of it. So I am a case in point of the human quest to do something meaningful. But I am also aware of the social privilege I have to do so. I wonder if ai will (or can) re-write human nature. Reality is subjective, based on dialectics…so maybe the answer is yes?
I mean, yeah man, this might work out if the energy didn't run out. But it's gonna run out here pretty soon. So, yeah, people won't work on offices anymore. You're right about that. But the lifeway is going to look more like hunter gatherers rather than old British gentlemen hanging out while our (digital) servants bring us things.
I think writing down what we want to see post-singularity is the first step towards making it happen.
yes, exactly!
Well put. Now on to the second step...
That's a utopian vision I can get behind. Won't be easy to get there though.
not easy at all, no. but not impossible perhaps
Oh! I've been waiting for an article like this for such a long time, and you wrote it brilliantly! For me the way a happy retired person lives her life is the way we should all live. My father retired when he was 54. Now he is 82 and has been so happy doing what he likes to do and with so much health.. I "retired" around my 40's and been doing many new and exciting things since. I don't understand why many people think that the ones who.do not work in an office are not worth it. The people who really live her life and is present are the ones who can create art, who can take care of others or the environment, the ones who smile more to others, who can guide the younger ones to help them. I also think that AI will help us to free ourselves from the slavery of useless work.
Sure, but this is indeed the optimistic scenario. And Dario’s later essay is bricking it because the machines wont just work instead of us, for us, but plausibly for themselves, which makes us not just redundant in our own lives, unless we can understand the nature of true freedom, as you rightly say, but probably extinct.
yes I’ve read his recent essay. will write about this soon. this all could indeed go both ways, but i am optimistic we as a species can find a way
IF we have the chance. A sliver of a mistake and it is all over. I must say I don’t fancy our chances — too many bad actors who seem bent on god knows what. But obvs there is no point thinking like this. Certainly we must plan for the optimistic scenario —
The wealthy build AI models to explore new markets, call it "disruption" and socialize whatever "collateral damage" they can't privatize for profit. Structurally, it's a Friday at the office of banal capitalism. The server farm is owned, the model weights are proprietary, the inference cluster sits on a balance sheet. Automation doesn't detach disruption from ownership simply because labor input shrinks. It shifts leverage to whoever owns compute, compute follows capital, capital allocates labor income and that income pays for your rent, your food and your toothbrush. Slash income from that chain and you're back to the old pavement. Not with "abundance". With exclusion.
Now, imagine scaling a post-work idyll to billions of excluded people with no income stream, no stake in the productive base, no "skin in the game". Zero labor claim, zero ownership claim. WWCD: What Would Capital Do? "Restructure" and "consolidate". Sink unprofitable segments, and double down on the most defensible margins. Fiduciary logic, the stuff of villains.
The secondary effect is less abstract: if billions become economically idle without guaranteed access to goods, they won't suddenly wake up as marrow-sucking philosopher-gardeners. They'll ration consumption, cannibalize savings and internalize decline as normal: the same picture of deferred hope we're already used to. When the pie's finally shaved down to crumbs? The AKs come out. On a long enough timeline, less competition radicalizes generations: when creative destruction outpaces creative absorption and when leisure expands without income, restlessness either expresses as innovation, or devolves into grievance. Corporations either recruit that energy into new roles and ownership models, or exclusion runs riot until the welfare state collapses.
Now, what?
Read the fine print: a surplus of involuntary leisure, of unused labor potential with nowhere to go, is a ticking time bomb. When resentment scales, institutions expand: prisons, courts, psych wards. More "governance", a.k.a. more surveillance, a.k.a. more "compliance". From the state's perspective, an idle mass with no purchasing power is a massive policy nail to hammer. That's where your fantasy completely breaks down. A social contract with no social reciprocity needs more management and more management needs "coercive capacity". Language shifts to "pacification", but Leviathan remains. Suddenly, the un-working class is no longer a banal item of capitalist redistribution but a systemic threat to cohesion. Suddenly, with less creative than destruction and with more leisure than leverage, all that accumulated resentment turns kinetic. Scale that across billions and the state responds with "force" &, then, suddenly: war.
Are you ready for that? You and what layabout army? History has run that script before. Tooth decay is a metaphor until no one can afford a dentist. Then, it becomes infection, and infection spreads. Social rot is just decay at scale, and even if decay is slow and managerially polite, the state won't dissolve just because work has. State violence doesn't bow down to utopia. Only you do, and efficiency will never claim as many bodies as romantic contempt for security has.
Any attempt to sever large-scale production from incentive structures has led to stagnation, oligarchy, or oppression. Does history even offer one reliable case of spontaneously occurring universal leisure? The lesson is that banal distribution can't be an afterthought. "I contribute, therefore I eat" is crude (and morally thin), but it stabilizes expectations even as capital and ownership remain concentrated. Eliminate contribution without guaranteed claims on output, without socializing the subsequent wave of collateral damage, and you engineer a society of mutually assured redundancy. Is that the road to eudaimonia? Or a dying pond where entropy compounds? If you and your friends become overnight retirees without a redesigned distribution mechanism for surplus, who captures the surplus? If labor costs buckle under the weight of unpriced demand and underfunded production, what anchors value to effort or entitlement to output? No ruling party would ever survive a post-work transition without first solving distribution along the productivity curve. If productivity rises but labor income collapses, what stops workers from dispersing? Try selling that and watch the ballots turn. Ignore the ballots, and the layabouts start looking for meaning in death. Yours, not theirs.
How do you plan to defend your life and liberty, then, with no means to arm yourself?
AI infrastructure runs on chip plants, lithium mines, rare-earth supply chains, undersea cables and energy grids that remain limited and geo-economically fragile. It's an imperialistic and extractive system, no doubt, but one that leverages scarcity to grow the pie. Capitalism is just the distribution algo. Why would it erase scarcity when it can price it, monetize our access to it, and reinvest the returns into more growth for welfare? Abundance doesn't float on charity vapors, nor does the machine pause for solidarity. A firm that replaces 70% of its workforce with inference servers will not sunset itself into contemplation or retirement. It will lower its prices, aggressively expand market share, and pressure competitors. Competitors will automate or collapse. Workers will retrain, migrate, or exit. Creative destruction will accelerate, barriers to entry will harden around capital and data moats, and if you happen to be displaced as well, you won't be gently ferried to a cabin along Thoreau's pond. You'll commute to an ever-tightening arena that demands fewer humans for more specialized roles. You won't work less by default: you'll compete harder by necessity. As long as energy and materials remain finite, and as long as supply chains are politically contested, work is a binding condition, and population structure becomes fate. Demography is destiny.
Now, push that premise forward: the most materially secure societies are also the ones that exhibit the lowest fertility rates. Work grants autonomy, but autonomy reduces birth rates. If you're waiting for post-scarcity to refill the nursery, you'll be waiting "in limine" forever. Comfort expands choice, which includes the choice to postpone or forgo reproduction altogether. Automated tasks don't abruptly remove the need for mating markets, or flatten status hierarchies. You rightly frame work-identity as a cage, but less work and more play still makes you a dull boy. It doesn't automatically yield flourishing and meaning and civilization still extracts the bulk of its meaning from coordinated production. Shrink the population and, at some point, it won't be able to produce any of the things you find so meaningful. Now, what? More symbolic stasis? A slower spiral of managed decline? A museum-civilization that curates its own dystopic afterglow?
We've been rehearsing that condition for decades. Infinite scroll, hyper-personalized feeds, dopamine loops that'll soon be tuned to your nervous system. When our attention is the commodity, there's no economy in the world that would power down for more "degrowth". We compete for more relevance, more identity and visibility and more income to audition for more bullshit jobs. Even with AI-tier efficiency, there's no free lunch at macroeconomic scale. Your freedom is still the freedom to starve at civilization's table. Your choice is still the choice to compete or be excluded. Otherwise, the trade-off is as clear as a technocrat's utopia: "You will own nothing and be happy".
Yes, the house of capitalist realism wins again. It sets the rules of the game and scripts the imagination of the players. Machines don't abolish markets, only capital can restructure them. AI doesn't dissolve capital, only bloody revolutions do. And before those tables turn, leisure will be converted into yet another instrument for profit-maximizing extraction. A coping ritual for isolated men and lonely women who live as disconnected, utopia-deprived atoms.
WWCD?
It's already cornered the market for utopia: all ideas, even the most contradictory ones, and all solutions, even the most "alt" or "punk" or fringe ones, can be repackaged by the logic of consumption as our appetites have no thinkable ceiling. Is that the delivery mechanism for the "marrow of days"? Rationed choice, a managed feed, and passivity sold back to us as freedom?
Slogans about the end of history or the inevitability of leisure are seductive, but sedative lullabies. "History is over, please recline" is the bittersweet whisper that turns would-be revolutionaries into bureaucrat reformers once they trade their scarves and berets for credentials and social credits. Any vision of the future, even the most recklessly defiant or optimistic, can be metabolized by consumption and absorbed by the system with the ease of a kitchen sponge. In the end, the question isn't whether automation arrives but who'll own the curve once AGI does, and whether we'll have rewritten the social contract before the curve has rewritten us. There's no frictionless, meadow-bound third way inside a finite, growth-driven system that co-opts everything and everyone in sight. If you want a post-work future that doesn't metastasize into surveillance and coercion, you have to solve distribution before displacement peaks. That kind of adaptation may be quieter than dreaming, but it outperforms loud aspiration every time. The machine isn't here to tuck you in. Darwin never eulogized comfort: that dream will end just as all civilizations do. Smaller than promised, angrier than expected, and confused by the very systems that made their comfort possible. Efficiency, for all its flaws, will continue to collect its due in patients, prisoners, domesticated revolutionaries, and dinosaurs waiting for the asteroid. Which one are you? It's a lot easier to disappear than it is to adapt and evolve.
Excellent work - I dont miss beneath the pavement anymore!
beautiful vision
I lived through a mini retirement stage from 2021 to 2025 and I identified completely with your description of eudaimonia. I flourished during this time and now in 2026 I am using the learnings from my lived experience to design my life more intentionally.
I am not as optimistic as you about the future, but if your vision comes through, I will be so happy flourishing again.
A very necessary counterweight to the doom and gloom discourse. Thank YOU.
I love this vision and agree completely with the idea that we are here for purposes other than jobs. What I find difficult to imagine is how we will be able to fund our lives in this futuristic scenario? Is AI going to do the jobs and then put money in our bank accounts because it doesn’t need it? I’d love someone to help me envision how this works?
This, I'm afraid, is the real problem: our employers won't simply keep sending us paychecks if we're not employed anymore. What we'll most likely be doing with our newly found leisure time is scrounging for food in trash containers in front of the mansions of the rich. But I'll be happy to be proven wrong.
I am so with you on the spirit - of ai giving us freedom to experience meaning and purpose. I just can’t see how we can erase thousands of years of social hierarchy (see social dominance theory). In my late 60’s I’m spending ($$$) “retirement” getting a PhD (in social psychology) for the joy of it. So I am a case in point of the human quest to do something meaningful. But I am also aware of the social privilege I have to do so. I wonder if ai will (or can) re-write human nature. Reality is subjective, based on dialectics…so maybe the answer is yes?
I mean, yeah man, this might work out if the energy didn't run out. But it's gonna run out here pretty soon. So, yeah, people won't work on offices anymore. You're right about that. But the lifeway is going to look more like hunter gatherers rather than old British gentlemen hanging out while our (digital) servants bring us things.