We know what a world without work looks like

The piece argues that if automation eliminates economically necessary labor, what remains will be a predominantly relational economy: jobs that require human-to-human connection and social standing. Drawing on economist Alex Imas’s concept of a “relational sector,” it claims such a shift would not be novel but a return to pre-industrial social economies where production and personal ties were inseparable. Meaning and identity would come less from paid work and more from networks, status, and ceremonial roles, reversing the bourgeois idea that dignity stems from productivity.

To support this, it surveys historical and ethnographic cases. Eighteenth-century court life (via Saint-Simon, Voltaire, Antoine Lilti, and Norbert Elias) exemplifies a world organized around intrigue, precedence, and performative ritual rather than labor. Primate-ethology comparisons underscore the dominance-and-alliance dynamics at play. A modern analogue appears in Susan Ostrander’s Women of the Upper Class (1984), where wealthy Midwestern women structure lives around hosting, fundraising (opera, symphony, hospitals), the Junior League, and arranging suitable marriages. The implication is clear: a post-work society would likely re-center social capital, ceremonial hierarchy, and voluntary elite stewardship rather than dissolve into meaningful idleness, even if contemporary institutions change the contours.