I’ve been thinking about why this story feels incomplete to me. Not wrong exactly, but missing something fundamental about how humans work.
The Utopia Pitch
Elon Musk keeps talking about how AI will eliminate most jobs and universal basic income will cover everyone. Sam Altman says something similar. So do a lot of the people building the systems that will supposedly make human labor obsolete.
The pitch goes something like this:
AI gets good enough to do most work. Companies need fewer employees. Governments implement UBI to cover basic needs. People are freed from the drudgery of working for survival. Everyone pursues their passions, makes art, travels the world, finally reads all those books on their shelf.
It sounds pretty good, honestly. I’d love to spend more time writing. I’d love to travel without checking Slack. I’d love to make music again without feeling guilty about not working on something “productive.”
But every time I hear this pitch, something nags at me. The logic seems clean on paper, and it completely ignores something fundamental about how humans work.
The Equation They’re Using
The mental model behind the UBI utopia is pretty simple. I mean, people work because they need money. And then you remove the need for money and you remove the need for work, and give everyone enough to live on and they’ll naturally drift toward leisure, creativity, and fulfillment.
This model treats work as purely instrumental. You do it to get something else. The job is the cost, the paycheck is the benefit, and if you could get the benefit without the cost, you obviously would.
For some work, this is probably true, like repetitive, draining, underpaid labor that exists because someone needs the paycheck. But I think the model undersells almost everyone.
The call center worker who takes pride in actually solving a customer’s problem. The warehouse worker who figures out a faster way to pack boxes and feels good about it. The retail employee who genuinely likes helping people find what they need. The developer who loves finding solutions to code problems and edge cases.
Economic necessity might be why they took the job, but it’s rarely the only thing keeping them engaged.
Humans find meaning in contribution. We want to be useful, to get better at things, to solve problems. This shows up everywhere if you look for it.
Why We Actually Build
I’ve been building things on the internet for over twenty years. Websites, newsletters, products, tools. Some made money, some didn’t. Some reached hundreds of thousands of people, and some reached dozens.
My co-founder and I launched TheDailyPreset in 2023. We didn’t need to. The bills were paid. DailyPhotoTips was running fine. Nobody was asking me to start another newsletter. We did it anyway.
And every single time I finish something, I start thinking about the next thing.
I’ve been trying to understand what actually drives this compulsion. Money is part of it, but it’s not the whole thing.
- Money is the obvious one. You need to eat, pay rent, and maybe save for retirement. Building products can generate income, and income provides security and freedom. This motivation is real and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I like getting paid for my work.
- Recognition matters more than most people admit. We want to be known for something. We want other people to see what we built and think it’s good. This is why people put “founder” in their Twitter bio and share MRR screenshots. The external validation feels good. It confirms that the work mattered.
- Craft is the one that sneaks up on you. The satisfaction of making something well. The clean code, the elegant solution, the interface that just works. This has nothing to do with whether anyone else sees it or pays for it. It’s the private pleasure of doing good work.
- Impact drives a lot of builders, especially in the open source world. You make something that helps people. They use it to solve their problems. You get emails from strangers thanking you for saving them hours of frustration. This creates a feedback loop that money alone can’t replicate.
- Compulsion is the weird one. Some of us just can’t stop. We finish a project and immediately start thinking about the next one. We get antsy when we’re not building something. Vacation feels uncomfortable after a few days. This might be a personality trait, a coping mechanism, or some kind of flow state addiction. I don’t fully understand it, but I know it’s real because I feel it constantly.
Most builders I know are running on some combination of all five. The money motivation might fade if UBI covers your basic needs. The other four probably won’t.
The Retirement Test
There’s a thought experiment I keep coming back to.
You win the lottery tomorrow. Fifty million dollars after taxes, invested conservatively, generating more annual income than you could reasonably spend. The money problem is solved forever. Awesome, right?
Year one is easy to imagine. You travel, you buy a nice house, maybe two. You eat at fancy restaurants, you catch up on sleep, you read books. And you essentially decompress from years of grinding.
What do you do in year two?
I’ve asked this question to a lot of builders and the answer is almost always the same.
They’d build something.
Maybe something smaller, something weirder, something with no commercial pressure. But they’d build. The money was never the only reason. Take it away completely and the drive survives.
This tells me something important about human ambition. It’s not purely economic, it’s not just about survival or status or even comfort. There’s something deeper, some need to create and improve and leave a mark.
The UBI optimists are right that money motivates a lot of work, but they’re wrong that removing the money motivation removes the work.
The Transition!
Here’s where I need to pump the brakes on my own optimism.
Even if human ambition survives the AI revolution, the transition is going to be absolutely brutal. The futurists skip this part. They talk about the before state, where everyone has jobs, and the after state, where everyone has UBI and pursues their passions.
They don’t talk much about the messy middle where a lot of people are fucked.
The middle is where actual humans live.
Someone who loses their job to automation doesn’t smoothly transition to watercolor painting. First they lose their income, then they lose their routine, their social connections, their sense of being useful. A UBI check might cover rent, but it doesn’t replace the psychological foundation that work provided.
| What the futurists imagine | What actually happens |
|---|---|
| Job disappears, UBI kicks in, person pursues passion | Job disappears, identity crisis, depression, maybe UBI eventually |
| Smooth economic transition | Entire communities collapse when major employers leave |
| People naturally find meaning | Meaning comes from contribution, which requires rebuilding from scratch |
| Retraining solves skill gaps | Retraining works for some, fails for many, takes years regardless |
The research on job loss shows that unemployment causes lasting psychological harm even when people find new work. Income replacement helps, but it doesn’t make people whole. Work provides structure, community, and identity that money alone cannot replace.
I’m not saying the transition is impossible, but I’m saying it’s going to be painful in ways that the “just implement UBI” crowd doesn’t adequately acknowledge. Millions of people will suffer through this shift even if the destination is genuinely better.
The Part That’s Actually Hopeful
If we do get to the other side, something interesting happens.
Right now, a lot of creative and building energy gets captured by economic necessity. You might want to work on an open source project, but you need to ship features for your employer. You might want to write a novel, but freelance work pays the bills. You might want to build a weird niche product for twelve people, but that won’t cover rent.
Remove the economic constraint and that energy gets freed up.
Open source software would explode and people would contribute to projects purely because the work is interesting and useful. Linux was built mostly by people who weren’t getting paid for it.
Imagine that dynamic multiplied across every domain.
Art would get weirder and more personal. Right now, creators optimize for algorithms and advertisers. Without that pressure, you’d see more work that exists purely because someone wanted to make it.
Products would exist that make no economic sense. Things built for tiny audiences, for specific problems, for the sheer joy of building. The indie hacker movement is already a preview of this, but it’s constrained by the need to generate revenue. Remove that constraint and watch what happens.
Human ambition doesn’t require capitalism to function, it just requires humans with time, tools, and problems to solve.
The Honest Caveat
I should be clear about something... I don’t know if any of this ages well.
Maybe AI gets good enough that building things feels pointless. Why spend a week on a project when you can describe it and have it generated in minutes? The satisfaction of craft might evaporate when the craft becomes trivial.
Maybe the compulsion I feel is generational. After all, I grew up when building things on the internet was hard and rare. Younger people who grew up with AI assistance might not develop the same attachment to the process.
Maybe I’m just rationalizing my own inability to sit still and maybe the healthy response to having your needs met is actually to relax and enjoy life, and my constant building is a bug rather than a feature.
I don’t think any of these are true, but I can’t prove it.
The future is genuinely uncertain in ways that make confident predictions look totally foolish.
What I Actually Believe
Here’s where I land after thinking about this for a while.
Human ambition is real and persistent. People will continue to build, create, and improve things even when they don’t need to for survival. The drive comes from somewhere deeper than economics.
The transition to whatever comes next will be hard. Much much harder than the optimists admit.
People will lose jobs, identities, and communities. Some will adapt and thrive while others will struggle for years. We should be honest about this cost even if we believe the destination is better.
But the endpoint might actually be good.
If we can get through the transition without too much damage, a world where people build because they want to rather than because they have to sounds pretty appealing. The work would be more meaningful, more personal, more weird.
I still don’t know why I can’t stop building things. But I’ve stopped worrying about it. The itch is there and it’s probably not going away. And based on the builders I know and respect, I’m not alone.
Twenty years in, I’m still launching new projects. The reasons have shifted over time. Early on it was more about money and validation, and now it’s more about craft and compulsion.
The external motivations fade but the internal ones persist.
That’s human ambition. The soul spec that runs underneath all the economic logic. It survives job loss, lottery wins, and allegedly transformative AI.
At least I think it does. Ask me again in ten years.