[surgical_fire]

Exactly.

I mean, I would love to live in a world where UBI was a thing, and people were free to pursue their interests without fear of homelessness or starvation. Capitalism is a system that requires an underbelly of people exploited through the coercion inherent to the inequality of the world.

That is an utopia, however. The reality is that most people - including yours truly - sell their labor to make ends meet. It certainly was not my lifelong dream to do backend development for a financial institution.

Your friend (and many others in this thread) operate under a naive and entitled assumption that their creative output should be enshrined as something special, whereas throughout history technology always replaced human capacity, and we are better for it.