You cant have the fruits of labor without the labor.
People make this calculus every single day, and nearly unanimously decide that it would be more detrimental to go without the fruits of labor (especially those that must be incentivized).
It is obviously worth exploring how to make work less miserable, or better fit the interests of a worker, but that is a genuinely difficult matching an allocation problem.
A "do what you want" policy would not result in the tasks people want done getting done.
The closest equivalent to a system without transactional incentives is individual subsistence farming where one has to work for oneself so they don't die.
That sounds weird to me. If people want it done, they would get it done, wouldn't they? Can you maybe expand with an example?
(Well, I guess if you're american you don't have fresh produce in your supermarket, but the point stands.)
If you don't get in the tractor and plough the field you don't get the wheat.
Economic value is no less real. If anything, it's much more real at the low end in fast food, the supermarket, labouring jobs etc than it is in Uber for dogs.
That excess time could be spent on leisure, instead the insatiable hunger for more is driving us to drudgery.
On one hand, I think this is an interesting question to put the value of work into context.
On the other, I think most of society would fight tooth and nail against it.
That said, I do know people who do live pretty simply, no electricity, healthcare, or fancy food.
It kind of reminds me of an old miner that would periodically ride into town on a donkey when I was growing up in the 90's. He was about 150 years out of place.
...why?
We'd still have modern computers and stuff. Dropping productivity wouldn't revert technology itself. So if you ask people "Do you want the same amount of housing and clothes and cars and services you could get back in 1994, but while working 4 days a week instead of 5?" what's the horrifying factor that makes them say no?
Most people wouldn't want to because they would have to cut 40% of their spending across the board.
there are a lot of people today that can already have the option to work less for less money but dont choose to do it.
I think people would fight tooth and nail.
People like to have more stuff, bigger houses, better cars, air conditioning, whatever.
What I'm not saying is all work is horseshit and let's all party.