[bendmorris]

>Boredom is a powerful motivator too.

>A couple months of laying around doing nothing will drive most people crazy

I think on HN we frequently assume that "most people" are like us, but HN is such an unrepresentative sample of the world that this is dangerous, especially here. You and I and other knowledge workers would probably get bored and want to do something useful to find purpose. But there are many people today who work at unskilled jobs because they have to put food on the table. They don't derive their sense of purpose from it. It's very difficult to predict what these people would do if they suddenly had no financial necessity to work. There are listless unemployed people living off of various forms of government assistance today, and this would make it possible for many more to join them.