So this life of total leisure is the thing we all want, and it is for that reason the capitalist system seems to work. Someone has to provide the labor that allows you to continue in a life of leisure.
Animals live a life of leisure without much work, and they don't have the infrastructure that we as humans have. They don't collapse.
How much work is essential in a society? Medical, agriculture, logistics? If we stopped creating new hardware or software for a few years, how much impact will that have on society? I would want to run a test to see the results.
^ This claim doesn't really sound like it has a lot of evidence to back it up.
As i see this problem I can break it down in 2 parts: - systems (including animals & humans) evolve or decline - our species doesn't have a central decision system
So, as I see it, animals live a life of constant pressure where the strong survive and the weak are culled out. No judgement here on the implications of striving for strength.
Suppose humans stop advancing our way to creating supporting tools that enable our weak to live. In my view this means those tools will decline and tend to disappear. Thus as a species we would be heading to the type of life animals live - I described above.
So, I argue that all work is essential work because when the outskirts of the bell curve of essential work are cut off, then the height of the bell curve drops as well.
This is not necessarily true. We could maintain systems without evolution or decline. For example, I don't think that cloth manufacturing has evolved much since the 70s. Shops have new ways to sell (via the internet), but we as a society could wear clothes from the 70s and have the same quality of life (in terms of clothing) as people back then. Think about how much unnecessary work and waste have we created by consuming clothes every year. How much damage could be avoided by not manufacturing more clothes?
> So, as I see it, animals live a life of constant pressure where the strong survive and the weak are culled out
Animals have the pressure to eat. They hunt, they consume what they need, and they rest until they are hungry again. They aren't constantly accumulating food or killing other species. That's the difference between animals and humans. The fisherman goes fishing every single day from 9 to 5, no matter if society is hungry or not.
And this totally doable, and I think a lot of people could live in leisure for quite a while.
At some point though unless we live much more nomadically and never storing up for the future, we will need to make sacrifices in life again for some higher goal, to those who come after us in order to once again have the fat of the land.
This is just the way of life though.