Probably work and economic growth as goals haven’t really done it for us, leaving us with those uncomfortable and existential anxiety raising questions, “is this it?” and “is this what I have done with my life?”.
Changing our own goal and that of our society and aligning them to the reasonable goal of the prosper-within-limits theme will inevitably lead to a different organization of our lives and our society. For example, a basic income will compel employers to freshen up on their motivational skills not being able to use force or dire straits to get those of us humans whose inner mojo is not work per se or economic growth to work for them.
Sharing money would not only free up human potential and free up humans themselves (so that you don’t have to make cluster bombs or 4K televisions or gasoline trucks or promote all of these if you don’t want to) it will also help to save us from disaster. Because with a work and a growth imperative we will crash into the limits of our earth trying to create more and more growth with more and more work and there is a limit to money themselves.
To underline if our planet has limits, which it has, our resources are limited, our space for waste are limited and therefore also work, in the modern panacea holy graal definition, and money will be limited as it somewhere down the financial complexity line is coupled to real wealth. These limits are something that a basic income can recognize.
For those of us who become provoked by this idea of freeing human potential, will see that basic income is proposed from the left and right and might find some truth in that the just desert argument ignores the many instances of luck and that many deserts in many cases are the results of the efforts of others or consequences of systemic traps. For those that wonder where the money can come from ignores the imagination used when needed to defend the current economy and relief packages up to trillion billion dollars pulled from a magic hat and probably have no idea of what money really is and how it is created (Try it, ask them!).
Using our imagination of money and sharing our human productivity advancement (Economic Growth - Our World in Data) through money we could, as Keynes hoped, solve our economic problem with more automation and far less work and prosper within limits and everyone could prosper with a universal existential anxiety relief package of around 15 500 dollar a year.
Fly little birds! Fly!