Whenever you notice some trend in society, especially a gloomy one, you should ask yourself: "Did previous generations complain about the exact same things?" If the answer is yes, you might have discovered an aspect of human psychology, rather than an aspect of human culture. I've spent a long time studying people's complaints from the past, and while I've seen plenty of gripes about how culture has become stupid, I haven't seen many people complaining that it's become stagnant.

Related: a quote from a novel I've just read, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead:

I grew up in a beautiful era, now sadly in the past. In it there was great readiness for change, and a talent for creating revolutionary visions. Nowadays no one still has the courage to think up anything new. All they ever talk about, round the clock, is how things already are, they just keep rolling out the same old ideas. Reality has grown old and gone senile; after all, it is definitely subject to the same laws as every living organism -- it ages. Just like the cells of the body, its tiniest components, the senses, succumb to apoptosis. Apoptosis is natural death, brought about by the tiredness and exhaustion of matter. In Greek this word means "the dropping of petals." The world has dropped its petals.

But something new is bound to follow, as it always has.

A healthy tree produces enough sugars to fuel its own cellular respiration and still have enough left over to trade with other organisms. They "work" more than necessary to produce this surplus. They give the extra sugars to fungi and microbes underground in exchange for micronutrients, microbial cellular parts and soil conditioning. They could give sugars to nearby trees of a similar species in hopes of growing a cooperative forest. They give sugary nectar to flying insects in exchange for pollination, or to ants for protection. They give sugary fruits to birds, squirrels and humans in exchange for seed scattering. Even though trees can survive on much fewer leaves than they actually grow, they are motivated to grow extra leaves because they want to thrive in a vibrant ecosystem. Their extra-work is to foster a nurturing community; interspecies relationships with willing participants.

When modern humans work more at their jobs to earn beyond what they immediately need, it's usually for more personal stuff or more money in their individual savings accounts. In order to earn more, they'll usually spend more time away from their home or community while becoming persons narrower in function and vision. Their extra work usually does little or nothing to enrich their surrounding community. Compared to the trees' extra work, it's a very isolated and isolating practice.

On the other hand, I've noticed that an abundance of people are highly motivated to work for free to immediately enrich their community. Feeding the hungry, planting trees, picking up litter, building community gardens are all examples of the same kind of extra-work that trees do, but when we do it, we call it "volunteering".

This is why I think a 100% volunteer workforce is realistic, and why we're still on the ground floor of the human potential. If we get a UBI, or any other mechanism to make us actually free, if it's not only adults but kids who can find their own path of "get to" and not be suffocated with "have to", and if we can keep it going into the third generation, I think they'll look to us like superhumans, and they'll look back at us the way we look at Dickensian workhouses. Right now there are hundreds of potential Mozarts and Einsteins being used up in wicked schemes to leverage wealth into more wealth, and to replace the cooperative nonhuman world with the controlled human world.

It's not like plants really get sunlight for "free" -- they have to work for it. They need to expend energy and materials to build leaves to absorb the sunlight, and stems to support the leaves, etc.

Yes, and by that logic, the statement "He who does not work shall not eat" is perfectly compatible with everyone getting free food, because we still have to do work to chew and swallow and digest it. What those guys were really saying is "I believe in a social order in which people must repeatedly do tasks they do not find intrinsically enjoyable, under the threat of starvation." Out of millions of species on this planet, only one species does that, and not even in all societies. Alex comments:

I've thought about this over the last few years and obviously, in the world that formed us all, the hunter-gatherer world, you had to "work" if you were gonna eat, other than if you were injured or sick or a treasured elder etc. But "work" was a lot less like "work" as we understand it now and more like "play" or "something people just do".

No, and yes. It's only in the hunter-gatherer world (so far) that prime-of-life non-elites might feel no pressure to be productive. And putting "work" in quotes is exactly why. Plants don't have to make leaves -- they get to make leaves, they get to express their nature in a way that almost no humans get to do at their jobs.

Even modern people who go out hunting or foraging don't resent people who stay home, and for the same reasons: there's enough food, and hunting and foraging are deeply satisfying when your ancestors have been doing them forever. But as soon as a society gets more technologically complex, it starts adding tasks that are a stretch for human nature, and eventually coercion becomes necessary to keep the game going.

We're not going back to the stone age. Humans are pretty flexible. But right now the human-made world is farther than it's ever been from our ancestral environment. That's why the streets are full of crazy people and everything is falling apart.

There was no advertising in the Soviet Union. It was wonderful. In many ways people were happier and freer there. I will add that in the USSR people's labor was exploited in the sense that you produced more value generally than you were paid for. But, unlike in capitalism, people's consumption was not exploited. In fact, they didn't want you shopping and buying things because that meant someone had to serve you in shops and produce things for you in factories instead of getting drunk with friends and telling jokes to each other far into the night.

For balance, a Reddit thread, People from former Soviet republics. What is something people who never lived under communism just don't get about communism? One comment: "My dad described it as living in a country run by the world's most powerful and vindictive HOA. You can't paint your fence, and if you complain about it, you might just disappear."

I'm optimistic, because if there has been even one society without advertising, that proves that it's possible, and can probably be done without all the drawbacks of Soviet life or Medieval life. So what other things, that Americans don't think can be done, can be done?

It's funny, the guy who ruined Communism, the guy who ruined Christianity, and the guy who ruined America, all said the same thing. Vladimir Lenin: "He who does not work shall not eat." Paul the Apostle: "He who does not work, neither shall he eat." Ronald Reagan: "There is no free lunch."

Is that true? It's definitely not a universal rule, just look at all the plants getting free sunlight. It's not even true for all humans. I've mentioned before how some primitive cultures don't even have the concept of freeloading. I finally got around to digging up the actual quote, from The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers, pages 851-2:

A third fact about hunter-gatherer economies also runs counter to the notion of economic man central to modern economic theory: no necessary connection exists between production by individuals and distribution to individuals. Economists argue that sharing has an economically rational basis. The person we share our catch with today may feed us tomorrow when our luck or skill fails. In this view, sharing is a kind of insurance policy that rationally spreads the risk of not having anything to eat. Sharing in hunter-gatherer cultures, however, is much more profound than this. In many cultures at least, there is no connection between who produces and who receives the economic output. According to Woodburn, for example, some members of the Hadza do virtually no work their entire lives. Many Hadza men gamble with spear points, and many are reluctant to hunt for fear of damaging their gambling "chips", yet these men continue to get their full share of the game animals killed. Although "freeloading" is always a potential problem in all cultures, disdain for those not engaged in productive activity is evidently a culturally specific emotion.

Thus the "demonic" is properly understood less as a specific category of supernatural being than a collective reflection on unfortunate occurrences, on the ambivalence of deities, on tensions surrounding social and sexual roles, and on the cultural dangers that arise from liminal or incomprehensible people, places, and activities.

I can learn stuff from this book, but it's difficult and not fun to read. The other book is for a popular audience: The Eighth Tower, a.k.a. The Cosmic Question, by my favorite paranormal author, John Keel. Keel writes constantly about what the entities actually are, but rather than settling on a truth and defending it, he just spins out wild speculations with no attempt to make them consistent. It's great fun to read. A sample:

Over and over again the Bible tells us how men were instructed to create solid gold objects and leave them on mountain tops where the gods could get them. The gods were gold hungry. But why? ... If the ancient gods were real in some sense, they may have come from a space-time continuum so different from ours that their atomic structure was different. They could walk through walls because their atoms were able to pass through the atoms of stone. Gold was one of the few earthly substances dense enough for them to handle. If they sat in a wooden chair, they would sink through it. They needed gold furniture during their visits.