> Seems fairly obvious to me that the boringness comes from adults having to… make a living. And for most people that equates to a 9-5 job that demands conformity and leaves little room for other things after you factor in all the other things adults have to be responsible for.

A full-time job and adult responsibilities still leave plenty of time to be “not boring” for people who make an effort to manage their time.

Many jobs also provide an opportunity for social exposure, get people out of the house (or at least out of their comfort zone and interacting with others remotely). I suspect a lot of people would actually become less socialized and outgoing if they didn’t have the structure of a job to make them adopt routine and discipline in their lives.

> I have an unproven suspicion that if UBI was a thing we would see a lot more “not boring” adults

The only remotely feasible UBI programs wouldn’t be supplying enough money for people to go out and live their best lives. It’s more of a subsistence amount of money.

In a theoretical world where large numbers of people received significant amounts of money and didn’t have to work, we wouldn’t all be going around doing leisure activities everywhere. The work of running, building, and maintaining the world we all inhabit must still be done, which would require significantly higher labor costs to make up for the decreased supply of labor. This would make everything more expensive, which means people would have to go back and get jobs if they wanted to have enough funds to do the “interesting” things beyond subsistence living on UBI.

It’s a common fantasy that removing the 40 hours per week of work would cause individuals to suddenly become more outgoing, adventurous, and interesting, but if people aren’t already doing those interesting and outgoing things on the weekends then I don’t think they’d suddenly start doing more of them with the job removed.