Nobody would work if housing and food were super cheap, for instance.
Liquid Death, CocaCola branded water, and household water filtration are unbelievable luxuries. Manufactured status for the masses. And my examines are truly luxuries: they are unnecessary for drinking water in developed countries.
Pools and green lawns have higher status when water is more expensive/scarcer.
I don't hang out with extremely high-status people, or the extremely wealthy, but I'm sure both of those groups have some surprisingly luxury water.
Luxury is a human concept that is completely disconnected from the underlying product.
Provenance, Branding, Myth, Environmental, Science all matter for status.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_(Klein_and_Thompson_...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/12/supply-b...
[3] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf
(think in systems)
I'd love to learn how you came to this definitive conclusion. At no point in human history have humans not worked (I'm sure there are some limited exceptions, none of which have been sustainable).
Perhaps you meant to say the point of life is to survive, but you have to work to make that happen.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ralph_Waldo_Emerson
“Art is the proper task of life” -- Nietzsche
"Art is to console those who are broken by life." -- Vincent van Gogh
Broadly speaking, creation is the meaning of life, not work, although some creation could be considered work. Survival is table stakes to achieve self actualization and a chance at finding meaning and contributing to the commons during a lifetime.
This is a non sequitur. The discussion is about the point of life. At no point in history have humans not pooped, but I would imagine that few consider pooping the point of life.
There are no such things as "basic needs". If people can easily satisfy their basic needs, they simply expands this concept until it ceases to be easily satisfied
In other words, abundance is a myth promoted by mentally ill cultists, and meeting the basic needs of all people is unattainable.
How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all? Insights from needs-based analysis - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245229292... | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wdp.2024.100612
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43465127 - March 2025 (26 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42529256 - December 2024 (10 comments)
(TLDR Decent living standards for 8.5B people would require 30% of current resource use)
> Decent living standards for 8.5B people would require 30% of current resource use
That claims seems to be based on your first link.
1. They define decent living standards as including things like 1 cooking appliance, a mobile phone, and internet, but not things like a dishwasher/microwave/Netflix account, etc.
2. To achieve this, they specifically say that existing resource uses that are wasteful, such as buying extra clothing, wasteful entertainment, etc, should be “reallocated” to the basic needs of society, as without reallocation they explicitly point to how the basic needs like food and shelter become too expensive.
So in the context of the grandparent commenter’s argument, we would have to take away a lot of the luxuries (which is probably a fair description) that most Americans have like entertainment, buying more clothes than they need, etc and would not include things like any trips/travel, eating out, etc - and you believe people would react the opposite of what the grandparent claimed, that they would not consider those things to be “basic needs”? I guess if we were truly able to eliminate most inequality and all millionaires, etc, then maybe people would accept life without those existing things they have as basic needs? But I am not sure if your argument is meant to be a thing that could happen in real life, or merely a “If I was dictator I'd ensure peace on earth” type idea?