Maybe there aren’t enough jobs because we don’t all need to be doing paid work 40+ hours a day. We do need to eat though and we can’t do that unless we work.

My last job was a temp gig at a corporate headquarters of a publicly traded company where no one but the administrative assistants, cleaning staff, cafe staff, and other support staff really did anything. I thought it was just me not understanding a shared corporate language or something. But the people I interacted with spent the majority of their days talking about how busy they were, chatting with coworkers about their weekend, and walking around the building to talk to different coworkers about their weekend.

It’s hard to quantify how much “work” got done in my year there, especially on teams I didn’t interact with. But in my section of the company, I saw projects that would be a homework assignment for a college student start before I got there and still be going when I left with a dozen people directly working on it.

All that ramble is to give background to my gut reaction, that we’re unemployed because the economy doesn’t need us, there’s too many workers already. If we had universal basic income, I’d be doing a couple things I enjoy like baking bread for friends or making wooden furniture, and I would be working some at the library. I think a lot of those pointless jobs would just disappear too, as people had the opportunity to do something meaningful or more real. At minimum, then we wouldn’t need to find paid work to eat.