By Stu at SJI Creative
We’ve all had the thought, and probably the conversation: “What would you do if you won the lottery?” Or something similar – beyond fantasies of dream homes, cars, holidays, etc., what would you actually do?
Working beyond the requirement
Well, imagine if you will that you have suddenly found yourself in receipt of a significant windfall; the circumstances don’t particularly matter, but for whatever reason, you no longer need to work. Would you continue to do so?
Research conducted by Opinium Research in August of 2025 indicated that 51% of the employees they surveyed would continue to work even if they didn’t need the money. 7% participating in the survey were already in that position. What’s more interesting (to me, at least) is the demographic breakdown of the research: 63% of under-35s surveyed replied in the affirmative, compared to only 33% of those aged 55 and over. Additionally, a much larger proportion of those surveyed in London responded positively to the question than those in Wales. Which again raises questions of environment, culture, expectation and innumerable other factors that, if I took the time to list them, would probably fill a post all by itself.
The original article at HRNews can be found here.
What is “Work”?
Work is defined by the Cambridge English Dictionary, in the first instance, as “an activity, such as a job, that a person uses physical or mental effort to do, usually for money.”
Concerning the study presented in the linked article above, as limited as it is, it raises more questions about the place work has in our culture and indeed what is “work”? The article doesn’t specify whether the respondents would continue in their current positions (with the exception of the 7% already in the position of not needing to work). What shape would the “work” take for the individuals in question if they didn’t need the money? What shape would it take for you? The running of a charitable foundation would be work – indeed, we know it is, the salaries of top charity executives are often the subject of controversy. Volunteering is counted as work by the UK Government for the purposes of calculating certain out-of-work benefits.
One example we can turn to to find a partial answer to our question is Finland. Finland ran a Universal Basic Income (UBI) trial on a limited basis in 2017 and 2018; 2000 randomly selected individuals were given the equivalent of £490 a month for that period, with no obligation to seek work and no reduction in payment if they found it. The study found that participants were more likely to pursue what they cared about, without worrying about affording necessities, which gave them the freedom to take chances they otherwise might not have. In other areas, it was found that individuals receiving the UBI payment were more likely to turn down low-paying, insecure work they would otherwise have been forced to take to make ends meet. The full text of the relevant article and additional links to the study are available here. Several additional pilot programmes across the globe in recent years have all found similar results.
Work in a changing economic environment
There’s a lot of rhetoric floating around the internet regarding the future of work as a whole in the wake of increased automation since the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) and other generative systems, supposedly reducing the need for human capital, particularly in the professional sectors (aka “white collar”) jobs that were previously seen as insulated from automation. The levels of human labour required in manufacturing, building, mining, and other labour-intensive roles have long been eroded by mechanisation and automation, often in industries where the work was both dangerous and intensive. There was a safety argument for eliminating those roles as much as there was a cost-saving one. That same argument can’t really be used for office-based roles (although anyone forced to sit through office workplace safety videos might be led to believe otherwise!).
My “AI” scepticism is well established for regular readers of this blog; that scepticism remains unshaken on a personal level – and I promise that this piece will not become yet another anti-generative-system tract. It is worth thinking about, however, in the context of the wider question: If we are all eventually outmoded by automation, what comes after? The dubious beneficence of our various national governments, let alone the questionable motivations of billionaire tech CEOs, notwithstanding.
What would you do?
Thus, we come to the heart of the question: what would you do? If suddenly confronted with a situation in which you no longer need to work to survive, which is what the vast majority of people in work do it for, would you continue to? I think I would, albeit in a very different fashion. Indeed – without getting too much into my personal life – it’s arguable I already work without strictly needing to do so, not because I’m financially free, quite the opposite. Still, I do, strictly speaking, have all my necessities accounted for owing to an unenviable health status. I don’t recommend any healthy people reading this swap!
I’m left with more questions than answers. I wonder, as previously “safe” sectors of work are encroached upon by automation, if the promises of automation will remain unfulfilled, history would agree that they will. In which case, in the event of a world with too little work, but authorities potentially unwilling to support those without it, what will any of us do? But perhaps the socioeconomic puzzles of a potential post-work world are too in-depth to consider here.
But indeed, in the ideal outcome, the utopian one à la Star Trek, human society is enjoying a post-scarcity utopia, beyond the need for a monetary system and certainly beyond the need for work as defined above. Yet the people inhabiting that universe still perform activities you and I would recognise as work. Not for monetary reward or any kind of need – but for self-fulfilment. Simply because they can.
The other potential outcomes perhaps do not bear thinking about.
