[pacala]

Work gives us purpose. There is no substitute for enjoying the fruits of one's labor. Working on teams anchors us socially. On the flip side, working for someone else with little agency and decompression time is not very enjoyable.

Between pointless distraction and work, most people will pick the latter, especially after a solid decompression period, in spite of the surface enjoyability balance favoring the former.

[jsjolen]

There's a lot of work that I want to do that I cannot be paid to do, therefore those are the things I would be doing with my time instead.

Being paid is not a substitute for enjoying the fruits of one's labour.

[pacala]

True. The point is that at a personal level leisure is no long term substitute for work.

On organizing work. Chances are that at some point you'll want to work on things beyond the scope of what you can accomplish on your own. Or want to have a larger impact on the world / other people's lives. The big question is how to organize the work of people at society level. The pay per work model has proven to be very effective and gave us the marvels of the modern world.

On the shadow side, the pay per work model has become heavily geared towards exploitation, as in exploration vs. exploitation. We are at a point where worker conditions in a BigTech warehouse, or as a mechanicized Turk, are meticulously quantified exploitation. At the same time, we find it natural to expend the energy budget of a small city to enable machines do large-scale exploration.