Welcome back to another Question of the Week here at The Confusing Middle!

As always, the questions come from Gregory Stock’s The Book of Questions. Last week we were somewhere pretty dark, so this week Stock pivots in a different direction entirely. He’s not asking us to confront our mortality or wrestle with the justice system. He’s asking us to imagine something that most people, at some point in their lives, have daydreamed about.

This week’s question:

If advanced technologies enabled everyone to enjoy the material benefits of an upper-middle-class lifestyle without having to work, how would you change your life? What would most concern you about such a bountiful world?

Go ahead, take a second with that one.

The Question You’ve Already Answered a Hundred Times

There’s a version of this question that most of us have run through before, usually while sitting in traffic or staring at a spreadsheet on a Tuesday afternoon. It tends to go something like: If I won the lottery, what would I do?

The fantasy is quick and satisfying. You’d travel. You’d sleep in. You’d finally have time to read all those books, or write that novel, or learn to play guitar. And for a while, you probably would do some of those things. That’s the pleasant part of the thought experiment.

But Stock isn’t asking about winning the lottery. He’s describing something far more radical: a world where this is everyone’s baseline. Not a windfall for a lucky few, but the ordinary condition of all human life. That’s a different question entirely, and it gets interesting fast.

What the Science Says (Spoiler: It’s Complicated)

Before I tell you what I’d do personally, it’s worth sitting with what researchers have learned about what happens when people are freed from financial necessity, even partially.

Studies on Universal Basic Income programs have produced a consistent finding that surprises almost no one who thinks about it honestly: when people receive unconditional income, they tend to work fewer hours. A 2024 National Bureau of Economic Research study examining guaranteed income recipients in two U.S. states found that participants worked decreasing hours over the course of the study, with leisure time being the primary beneficiary of the extra financial cushion.

That’s not automatically a bad thing, depending on how you feel about the value of labor. But what’s more interesting to me is what the psychological research says about meaning.

There’s a concept in psychology called hedonic adaptation, sometimes called the hedonic treadmill. A landmark 1978 study by researchers Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman found that lottery winners, assessed after receiving their windfalls, were not significantly happier than people who had won nothing. They’d adapted. The new normal became the normal, and the extraordinary material upgrade stopped generating the feelings they’d expected.

That research has been refined over the decades since, and the picture is more nuanced now than “money can’t buy happiness.” But the core insight holds: we have a remarkable capacity to stop appreciating good things once they become expected rather than earned.

Which brings me back to Stock’s question.

What I’d Actually Do

Here’s my honest answer: I’d probably keep doing most of what I already do.

That sounds like either a humble brag or a complete failure of imagination, and I understand the skepticism. But hear me out.

I work from home. I write. I maintain a blog that I’ve been running for over twenty years. I watch movies, play video games, spend time with my dog Krypto, and engage with the pop culture I love. I do all of that now, around the edges of a job that I find genuinely meaningful in its own right. If I no longer had to work, I’d lean further into the creative side of things, spend more time on writing projects, read more, maybe finally commit to that stack of books on my TBR shelf I’ve been meaning to get to.

But I also know something about myself that Stock’s question surfaces in an uncomfortable way: I think I would eventually feel the absence of something if “work” disappeared entirely. Not the stress of deadlines or the frustration of administrative tasks. Something else.

There’s a kind of satisfaction that comes specifically from building something with effort, from solving a problem that mattered, from contributing to something beyond your own living room. I believe, after sitting with this question, that I’d eventually find a way to volunteer somewhere. Not because I’d be bored, but because I’d want to feel like I was still making some kind of difference. A world where everyone’s material needs are met is not automatically a world where anyone feels necessary, and feeling necessary turns out to matter quite a bit.

The Concern That Keeps Surfacing

Stock’s second question asks what would concern me about this bountiful world, and I find this half genuinely harder to answer.

The concern that resonates most with me is this: what happens to human ambition when necessity is removed from the equation?

Some people would flourish. Artists who couldn’t afford to take risks would take them. Scientists freed from grant-chasing and institutional pressures might pursue questions they actually find interesting. Teachers, caregivers, and volunteers would be doing what they do without the economic pressure to go do something else instead. That’s a real and meaningful upside.

But I also think about how much human achievement has been driven, at least in part, by the need to prove something. To create, to invent, to build because you had to, because the alternative was worse. Not all of it. Probably not even most of it. But some of it.

The research on effortful leisure is relevant here. A 2025 study published in Communications Psychology found across multiple experiments that people consistently rate effortful activities as more meaningful than easy ones, even when the easy ones are more enjoyable in the moment. We are wired, it seems, to find meaning in challenge. Removing necessity doesn’t automatically remove that wiring, but it removes one of the most reliable delivery systems for it.

A world where no one has to work is also a world where work, when people choose it, could mean something entirely different. It could be purer, more intentional, more human. That’s the optimistic version, and I want to believe in it.

But I’d be lying if I said I had no anxiety about a world where the people around me had no particular reason to get up and try tomorrow.

One Thing That Doesn’t Change

Here’s what I keep coming back to: Stock’s question assumes the technology exists. What it doesn’t resolve is whether meaning can be manufactured at scale.

You can automate the production of material abundance. You cannot automate the feeling that your contribution mattered, that the thing you made was worth making, that your presence in the world left something better than it found.

That feeling, I think, is what most people are actually chasing when they say they want to stop working. They don’t want to stop doing things that matter. They want to stop being forced to do things that don’t.

If the technology Stock imagines arrived tomorrow, the most important question wouldn’t be how to fill the time. It would be how to preserve the sense of purpose that work, at its best, provides. Not because leisure is empty. But because meaning is something we build, and building takes effort by definition.

Your Turn

This is the kind of question where I genuinely want to hear what’s on the other side of your answer. What would you actually do with your days in a world that didn’t require anything of you? And does that prospect feel more like freedom or something closer to unsettling?

Would you keep some version of work in your life, even if you didn’t have to? And what concerns you most about a world where everyone’s needs are met without anyone needing to earn it?

Leave your thoughts in the comments. I mean that in the same way I always mean it, which is to say: I will actually read what you write, and it will probably make me think about something I hadn’t considered.

Until next week, this is Aaron, at The Confusing Middle, wondering what Krypto would think about a world without purpose.

Feature Photo by azra irem Topcu