The only thing that stops is tolerance of actual garbage bosses, abusive companies and saying “yes” to decisions that require you to be immoral.
I quit my job. A handful of my coworkers did the same.
Most people, when given the chance to stop working, they stop. Just look at pensioners, including those who get a pension at 50. The vast majority simply stop working.
(Although I might start substitute teaching this Fall ... maybe I didn't retire after all.)
But I'd be very surprised if you didn't still spend a goodly proportion of your time beavering away at endeavours that were productive to yourself or others in your family and community.
For example, those "bridging the gap until their pension" are as likely to be reducing childcare costs (which are otherwise often subsidised by government/tax) for their descendants, spending more time on their own health, reducing the $health burden upon government, and any number of other potential reductions of the need for government spending. In equal proportion to the reduction in formal employment load upon the individual.
If you gave me a $basicIncome raise I’d keep working; but I’d appreciate the cash.
If you guaranteed $basicIncome for life I’d restructure my life around that, and likely FIRE.
Two of those are “work”
The report also says that half of those who stopped working went back to school! So that's no more than 13% who really became "idle". And there are also questions we should ask about that group, like their age composition, for instance. If of the 13% that quit working without returning to education or training, many of them were older people, wouldn't that meaningfully change the picture as well?
People are burned out. They are overworked. Over-stressed. Most of them were just hurled into careers by the system without much choice because they had to make a living. Most of them didnt even have time to think about their choices. A majority has spent decades struggling for survival amidst financial insecurity. When universal income starts for the first time, all of these people will stop for a while and start revising their lives. Something which they needed to do way before, but were not allowed by the system. Its natural.
When they get over the burnout and do their reflection, they will go active again. We see this in the case of the privileged minority who are able to retire early or take sabbaticals. They rest and do random stuff for a while, then they go back to doing something they want to do. Especially in tech, that has been the case.
People dont like staying idle for long.
People I know grow crops, make food, paint, draw, build worlds, write stories, create programs and so on. And these are people from every area in life.
Just picking out this one out of curiosity, not arguing the broader point.
In a world where people have more freedom on what to spend their energy and time on I would expect some things to return to the realm of unpaid labour. Child care, mentoring, care for the elder, local community contributions. Probably not replacing the demand entirely, but surely some shifts in supply and demand would be observed.