-if the post-scarcity UBI future ever happens-

I live in a country that throws away half of its prepared food. Like we're not even talking about some chopped up animal corpse that sits out for too long and has to be discarded before it goes rancid - in the US we strait-up assemble food in some factory, wrap it plastic, burn fuel shipping said wrapped and assembled food to a store halfway across the country, unwrap the food, put it in another container, and then at the end of the day just toss the remaining contents of the container into the garbage bin because you've got a few more tons of shipped and prepared food already in storage that needs to be sold. This is the post-scarcity future.

To be fair we're also hurtling toward ecological catastrophe and it's not clear we're gonna be able to do that indefinitely.

It won't be a problem* unless we make more of us. Political and religious leaders that oppose education and planned parenthood are the long term problem.

Ok, slaughtering is a problem, but I think it will sort itself out eventually.

don't you think it's a much bigger issue that we are normalized to a profoundly wasteful life style? this isn't really a population problem, it's an energy per capita problem.

No. It's primarily a population problem, although that does not mean that we should not manage the resources we have as efficient as possible.

Economy is not helped by people being eternally miserable - miserable people are less likely to find another job, more likely to start drugs or commit crime. Depression does not tend to incite people towards meaningfull action. Staring into wall does not build work experience anymore then game. Nor does hanging around cheap alcohol with other unemployed.

I do not know what the issue with construction is, but it is highly unlikely that the same city have thousands unemployed playing games who could otherwise work there - if only they were a bit more miserable.

I dunno, there's a line. Being a little bit uncomfortable can spur one to action. Most new parents are driven to be attentive partly out of a fear of killing or harming their child, for instance. Being just miserable enough to be motivated towards something healthy is actually good - the trouble is that it's very easy to be tipped over into destructive comfort-seeking.

I don't think "we should strive to make unemployed people more miserable so they're more motivated to work" is a proposition worthy of serious consideration.