Without all the hoops to jump through and prove disability or attend useless classes, people would largely find productive things to do. Sure it might disrupt other businesses, but if I had all the free time in the world and enough money, I'd find something to do. Maybe I'd start my own small farm, or sell prepared meals, or sharpen knives professionally, or run a political campaign, or volunteer for my favorite charity. You know, the kinds of stuff well off rich kids do.

Why is everyone so convinced people need to be told what to do to stay busy and engaged in the world?

I think you'll have a much harder time convincing women to not base sexual selection, at least in part, on resource gathering. That's pretty ingrained, and not just culture.

Not sure I follow, what does this have to do with meaning and work?

And even in a post-scarcity society, some things (like attention and social status) will always be valuable.

The whole discussion is built on a fantasy socialist utopia where the robots do all the work and we just issue everyone a paycheck to not work. Socialists have been singing this song since the beginning of socialism. It will never work because it doesn't match with human nature. Some kind of work must be found, and people will demand differential outcomes based on that work. People will destroy the robots before they let this socialist u/dys-topia come to fruition.

Well people will always "work", but I think the nature of what we consider "work" and "outcomes" might be different.

In our current scenario "work" is generate economic value, and "outcome" is dollars.

In another scenario "work" could be stories / media, and "outcomes" could be attention.

In another, "work" is playing video games, "outcome" is level.

In all these scenarios you have people feeling the dopamine and at some level deriving satisfaction. It seems a bit dystopian (and anti-social) even to me, but if we're just talking about "human limitations on society" then I don't see why it couldn't be the case.

If we really lived in a post-scarcity world like The Culture, I'd imagine we'd have to evolve how we think about "work" and "outcome" in the same way that most of us no longer "work" for the glory of god for an "outcome" in the afterlife.

>post-scarcity world

Well, we don't live in a fictional world. We live in a real world.

Then men will continue trying, as they have since time immemorial.

Exactly. A cultural change is big, but this is even bigger than culture, it's hard wired in our genes since before humans even became a species. So there will never be a magical fairy land where people just accept equal economic outcomes gifted to us by the robots. So we have to start there and figure out a different solution, the suggested solution is a nonstarter.