Post-scarcity cannot come fast enough; the (external) need to work hard should just die in a fire.
Maybe you won't have to work/pay for food if accounting for it becomes more work than producing it (if sufficiently automated and not resource-constrained). But if you want to live in a hip neighborhood (by definition there is limited availability), have your own flying car, go on vacation on the moon once a year where real people service you etc. you'll have to work for that. Because the ingenuity and work necessary to make this all happen will still be enormous.
Maybe you think you'd be happy with your today's lifestyle, which might be attainable for ~free. But I think the reality for most is that they'd grow jealous of their friends posting selfies from the moon and resent "the evil rich" again.
The small amount of work necessary to _survive_ today would sound marvelous to someone from even 100 years ago (clothes, food, shelter outside major cities). Mowing one lawn for 1-2h every day would probably be enough for that. But surviving isn't the point of being human, it's about stretching the limits of what is possible and that will always take as much work as we are willing to put into it.
Think of things the ancients could only dream of that are available to most people in developed nations:
- Fast transportation
- Antibiotics
- Instant global communications
- All of human knowledge in your pocket
- Climate controlled buildings
- Access to the global supply chain for goods
Yet scarcity persists, and people want more because wants are relative.
A thousand years from now, people will be jealous of others who have an annual off-world holiday, a family jet, life-extension therapy... And even then, lots of people will work hard because they want to improve their standard of living.
As long an human minds remain bound to human bodies, then we are limited by the finite resources of the physical world.
I believe that getting something for nothing is usually not sustainable. Just because you serve no purpose to those giving the things away for free. Something will give (some type of resource constraint will arise, even if it is just competitive/alternatives) and it will fail if you are not providing value.
I'd argue that's because we have a ton of junk food availability.
If I wanted to eat a roast and veggies from a local farm not covered in glyphosate, I'm going to pay for it.
Doritos and Cheerios are cheap af. But they're killing people.
We are arguably post scarcity of low quality corn and wheat, but what good is that? And that only comes because of subsidies.
Even if the whole world lived in a post-scarce global society, there would be wars fought over who controls the supply chains, who lives downtown and who lives uptown, who eats veal and who eats chicken, etc. And there would be entrepreneurial types who are willing to trade food for lumber, or land for sex.
We are still animals, and evolution is still a thing. We're clearly a k-selected species, but in post scarcity, what's to stop a portion of us from becoming r-selected?