Are recreational jobs the future?
With all of the talk about how AI is going to take our jobs, there is a lot of distress. But what it is driven by?
I would say two things: fear for survival and loss of meaning.
The first one is clear and it is easy to empathise with. There are currently no systems in place to subsidise people’s lifestyle. Mutually beneficial exchange is ingrained into our society and it is hard to think outside the box. But even if we could, the systems are too inert to adapt quickly.
However, in this post I want to touch upon a second aspect: the meaning.
The search for meaning has been a puzzle for thousands of years and we seem to be nowhere near uncovering it. We do observe a fact, though, that the more money someone makes does not necessarily make them happy. This suggests that these two are not correlated.
Further still, at all times there have been groups of people who “oppose the norms”. Who do things for the joy of it.
I cannot pinpoint the exact quality, but positions like tour guides, museum staff and such, there is a high chance they do the work selflessly. Like an archaeologist, who stumbled upon some never seen before curiosity.
It is just the part of human nature. I think it might be simply curiosity.
That feeling that drives you not because of some specific reward, but where the process itself is the reward.
So I have been thinking: what if in the future, when we figure out material needs, we will do most of the work recreationally. Not because we need to do it, but because we want to do it.
Out of curiosity and internal drive.
We already have such things in sports (not as a profession, but as a passion). I think in the future we might come up with jobs for ourselves and do them as a recreational activity, simply because we enjoy them and they give us meaning.
Funnily enough, we would still need to watch for work-life balance.