Very good science fiction depicting post scarcity society are Iain M. Banks Culture novels. To me it feels like a far more realistic post-scarcity future than Star Trek (although The Expanse feels more likely than either).
In the Culture there are AIs which remove the need for humans to do any more work and at times in the book he mentions how citizens find meaning to their existence despite a lack of drive for wealth or materials.
In one book (I can't remember which one) in passing it talks about a spaceship being somewhat pointlessly assembled by people, not because it's needed (AI and machines can do it), but because those people wanted to do something they thought would be interesting, I guess they thought of it like building a cathedral.
In the Player of Games, the protagonist prides themselves on being able to master any kind of (non-sports type) game and has built their social status and identity around it.
Despite the utopian existence, messy situations do arise and the stories tend to revolve around an organization within the Culture called "Special Circumstances", which exist to handle "Special Circumstances" which is anything outside of the usual, sometimes covert, sometimes diplomatic, sometimes crisis solving.
Anyway, I highly recommend them if you're into reading.
The post-scarcity thing didn't hold up to scrutiny either, even fictionally: there was nearly a civil war on Bajor because the Federation couldn't come up with enough soil reclamators to prevent a possible famine at one point. Any time something needed to be scarce for the sake of the plot or drama, it was.
For me the reality is, I would still want to be doing something. I would be more picky about what I would be doing but at its core I would likely still be doing work similar to what I am doing now, just instead I would make sure it is working towards something I have a passion for.
Otherwise, what are you doing with your life? Just sitting at home all the time, that is boring.
Me too. The reality of my existence is that I have tons that I want to do, and having to work for a living really gets in the way of doing it. The irony being working for a living provides funds for doing the stuff I'm actually interested in while at the same time draining away time for that same stuff.
Once you get hooked on travel, meeting cultures, doing various outdoor sports (some more or less extreme), questions like that become meaningless.
And that is before the ultimate meaning of life - kids come along.
But in all those cases, you wouldn't need to charge, because what would you spend the money on?
People will still seek status, but luxury goods as a concept will cease to exist.
Now, how prime real estate is doled out back in earth...
Though I wonder if something like nobility would make a comeback – when you can have almost anything you want, one of the things you can’t have is someone else’s family line! "New money" is meaningless in a society without money, but "old money" has the same value as it always has had – and it’s obvious why the former isn’t really held in high regard in many real societies either, compared to the latter. Banks talks about this a bit in Excession.
The demand for prime real estate is largely solved in the Culture by Orbitals anyway; indeed preferring to live on something as space-inefficient as a planet is seen as quaint and slightly eccentric.
This would explain why throughout the franchise, people believe Earth is a paradise and they claim humans have evolved beyond their base desires but it obviously isn't true.
And if you want to deal with money there are plenty of opportunities at the fringes of the Federation and beyond.
I think it unfortunately only works on a small scale where humans have a reason to care about each other, where they personally benefit from "sticking together" or the risks of not doing so are high. I.e., a village or small tribe (Native Americans were essentially communists), the crew of the Enterprise, a kibbutz or small colony, etc. Once you scale it up, people just don't care enough about the millions of others to be willing to do anything other than looking out for themselves.
I think it fails because the only people who want to lead a revolution are megalomaniacs who get into power after the revolution and turns it into a dictatorship instead of turning it over to the people. The average person just wants to live their life which is why populist strong men who promise more of the same old life are getting voted in.
edit: As for no money, they have replicators so the barrier to production is pretty much free making money mostly unnecessary. If I can walk up to a machine and have it produce a perfectly cooked steak with only energy and some form of matter input (air?) there's no need for cattle, ranches, ranchers, transport, slaughter, butchering, more transport, markets, etc. Basically the entire supply chain has been eliminated. And if that replicator makes more replicators, batteries and PV or whatever then yeah, game over for money.
This is essentially why I stopped reading books that exist solely to push some economic philosophy or something. You can make anything work in fiction. Here, watch:
"On Dysokis, the fifth planet settled by Earth, everyone is happy and healthy and lives in perfect harmony all the time, working together to advance the common good."
That was easy to write. It's not particularly any harder to expand it out into a story. But it doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean I have a path to that any more than anyone else does, or that if I do expand it out into a story, or a massive multi-decade shared franchise, that it has anything that can be practically obtained or emulated.
What "The Federation doesn't have money" really means is, we don't want stories about Geordi worrying about how he's going to pay his nephew's rent or Data arguing about whether or not he his patent for some $TECH is being violated and he's not getting paid out properly. We don't want stories about how some medical issue could be fixed but Ensign Bob can't afford to pay for it. We don't want stories about Commander Sally arguing about her pay raise. I know that's not what Roddenberry would have thought, but it's what it comes out to practically in the end in the shared universe.
And it works, and on the net despite its unreality I think it was a fantastic thing for the franchise. In the end, despite my disagreements with it being possible, the fact that I don't think Roddenberry meant it that way, and the fact that I don't even think Roddenberry was a particularly good guy, I think he backed into something that is a great deal of what made the Star Trek universe very special and why so many of us have enjoyed it so much. There's nothing wrong with the science fiction that explores societies that still have money and still have the resulting conflicts, but there's also nothing wrong with sometimes saying "Hey, that's not what this franchise is about" and using that as a way to explore into story spaces that the other franchises really can't, because money and conflict and such are forced by the logic of that particular franchise to wedge their way in and essentially dilute the rest of the story.
Would The Measure of a Man (can Data be dissembled and studied by Starfleet against his will?) been improved by adding a subplot about an argument about the size of the bond that should be posted before the trial? Would the Dominion War have been improved by an extensive plot about bribery causing substandard war ships to be created because someone at Utopia Planetia was just straight-up lining their pockets? There's nothing abstractly wrong with these ideas and they've been used in other series to good effect, but it's nice to have a series that spent no time on that particular aspect. And there'd be nothing wrong with some other franchise focusing almost exclusively on such a story.
But I don't think of the Federation "not having money" as anything other than a story device, and were I in charge of the franchise I would have written straight into the story bible that this is a framing device and authors are not to sit there and try to examine the details too closely, or try to write stories around how the idea doesn't really work. There's nothing to emulate there, there's no path from here to there, it just doesn't work. At least not with the model of human that I live with.
You don't seem to be acknowledging that rent goes down when basically anyone can start their own colony within a huge stretch of the galaxy, or that patents and wage comparison look kind of silly when everyone's basic needs are far beyond met, or that 'fixing a medical issue' becomes crazy cheap when replicator technology and computers are that far advanced.
> I would have written straight into the story bible that this is a framing device and authors are not to sit there and try to examine the details too closely
Star Trek: Lower Decks explored these ideas a bit more - right around the same time they were cancelled. Great episodes, highly recommend checking them out.
I would also observe that even from a Watsonian perspective that the idea that the Federation isn't exactly the utopia it is presented as is fairly easy to substantiate. For a society with "no disease" there sure are an awful lot of people with diseases. For a society that supposedly means that they have replicators and anyone can have what they want, the citizens read to me as extremely impoverished relative to that level of technology on the screen. They aren't deciding they want to head off to Risa for a vacation and just replicating themselves starships to get there. In fact Federation citizens seem to live in quite astonishing scarcity most of the time.
It makes sense from the Doylian perspective, though. The show isn't about the normal citizen and it would be very distracting to a 20th/21st century audience for them to be actually fabulously wealthy by any modern standard.