Trapped in work-mode @3QD [ultimately coping with AI]

I’ve got a new article at 3 Quarks Daily:

Trapped in Work Mode: The Real Challenge of AI is not Technical, It’s Conceptual, Mythic, and Institutional: https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/06/trapped-in-work-mode-the-real-challenge-of-ai-is-not-technical-its-conceptual-mythic-and-institutional.html

It’s about how we’ve become trapped in work-mode, a form of behavior that became solidified during the Industrial Revolution, though I don’t talk about how that came about. I open by talking about how my father, a very talented man with man interests spent an enormous amount of time playing solitaire once he’d retired. I then go on to talk about the rise of retirement coaches, professionals who help people adjust to the “rigors” of retirement. It’s as though many have become so “broken to the harness” of work that they are unable to figure out what to do with themselves when their time, once again, is their own. In this situation, I suggest, instituting universal basic income to support people who’ve lost their jobs to AI, that will amount an indirect subsidy of the drug industry.

I go on to suggest that, if we are to flourish under AI, we need to structure our social institutions around something other than work (Homo economicus), which is the current arrangement in the advanced nations. But I do not, in that article, suggest what I have in mind. What I have in mind, of course, is Homo ludens, which I’ve been writing about here and there.

The Industrial Revolution trapped us in work-mode

Consider this passage from Johan Huizinga, Chapter 11, “Western Civilization Sub Specie Ludi,” Homo Ludens, 1938:

The 19th century seems to leave little room for play. Tendencies running directly counter to all that we mean by play have become increasingly dominant. Even in the 18th century utilitarianism, prosaic efficiency and the bourgeois ideal of social welfare-all fatal to the Baroque-had bitten deep into society. These tendencies were exacerbated by the Industrial Revolution and its conquests in the field of technology. Work and production became the ideal, and then the idol, of the age. All Europe donned the boiler-suit. Henceforth the dominants of civilization were to be social consciousness, educational aspirations, and scientific judgement. With the enormous development of industrial power, advancing from the steam-engine to electricity, the illusion gains ground that progress consists in the exploitation of solar energy. As a result of this luxation of our intellects the shameful misconception of Marxism could be put about and even believed, that economic forces and material interests determine the course of the world. This grotesque over-estimation of the economic factor was conditioned by our worship of technological progress, which was itself the fruit of rationalism and utilitarianism after they had killed the mysteries and acquitted man of guilt and sin. But they had forgotten to free him of folly and myopia, and he seemed only fit to mould the world after the pattern of his own banality.

Thus the 1 9th century seen from its worst side. But the great currents of its thought, however looked at, were all inimical to the play-factor in social lif e. N either liberalism nor socialism off ered it any nourishment. Experimental and analytical science, philosophy, reformism, Church and State, economics were all pursued in deadly earnest in the 1 9th century. Even art and letters, once the "first fine careless rapture" of Romanticism had exhausted itself, seemed to give up their age-old association with play as something not quite respectable.

Beyond the human

Someone calling himself John Doe left a helpful and insightful comment:

I would like to propose that it misses the non-human-but-still-life perspective. I believe it to be essential for human flourishing in the long run. Physically and mentally. Humans usually define themselves in relation to other humans, sometimes animals, much rarer other lifeforms. Most of us believe they care about those and yet on a planetary scale (which is by definition not the human scale but still relevant for most humans to flourish) we are arguably in a predicament. Which leads me to the conclusion that it would be helpful to find a way to support flourishing for more lifeforms with less use of resources in absolute terms. This will be a very tall order which some, possibly many, will knowingly or unknowingly but nevertheless actively, refuse. Sometimes violently. It will also become much more of a question of cooperation and healthy competition on many levels.

I would argue that deliberate contemplation, meditation, care work in a broad sense (not only human-centric) should be encouraged. To be very pragmatic about it, maybe it'd make sense to set up community spaces that enable contemplation/meditation in some sort of social group.