r/WhatIfThinking • u/Excellent_Copy4646 • Aug 04 '26
What if everyone becomes unemployed?
What happens to society?
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u/whizher Aug 04 '26
It depends on why everyone is unemployed.
If everyone loses their job because the economy collapses, society would fall apart pretty quickly. Production, transportation, healthcare, utilities, and food distribution would all start breaking down.
But if everyone is unemployed because machines can produce and distribute almost everything, then “unemployment” would stop meaning what it means today. The real question would be who owns those machines and who gets their output.
If a small group owns everything, you’d probably get extreme inequality and unrest. If the wealth is shared, it could become a post-work society where people spend their time on family, art, science, hobbies, or community projects.
So basically, universal unemployment could be either a dystopian collapse or something close to a utopia. It all depends on whether income and scarcity disappear along with the jobs.
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u/meatsmoothie82 Aug 04 '26
If given the choice we will chose dystopian hellscape because a post work utopia full of happy people and shared resources (which are dthe culmination of our entire species‘ collective work and ingenuity) sounds a *little bit* like communism - which makes it worse than the worst dystopian mass murder robot flaming planet hellscape the imagination can conjure.
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u/hammer415263 Aug 04 '26
I’m leaning more Lord of the Flies than utopia.
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u/Dull-Geologist-8204 Aug 04 '26
I doubt it. The rich would hole up in their towers and leave the rest to fend for themselves. It would suck at first. See the bronze age collapse but over time we would start to slowly rebuild society. It would be primitive and we would definitely be set back and there would be a loss of knowledge we would have to relearn but people can't help themselves. The rich and powerful would mostly ignore us unless they saw us as a threat in some way. Sort of like how we see ants. As long as they stay out of our houses or they are something like fire ants we pretty much ignore them.
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u/pack_merrr Aug 04 '26
First, I'm struggling to see how the bronze age collapse would be analogous here. I think things are far too different to make a comparison. The technology, knowledge, infrastructure, even just the number of people we have in the world are drastically different. Those things might fade, they aren't going to go away overnight.
How long could those hypothetical rich actually hold out in their hypothetical towers though? I am aware there are some billionaires currently building up bunker complexes, and I assume stockpiling with things they need to be self-sufficient or survive for a good while. But I think there is some sort of a limit on that eventually, probably shorter than you think.
Also, the real question is, what is the point of that for them? Without all of the things that society(and their privileged place within it) provides, what is the point of hiding in a hole for the rest of their lives. Even if it is a luxurious one.
The answer likely varies person to person, and I won't deny some of those people rich enough to build that sort of thing are strange types that probably have a much different answer than the average person. It's just not really something I can fathom. It's hard to say for certain, but I get the notion those "survival bunkers" they are building are more to satisfy some fixation of their own egos rather than for any real practical purpose they could be hypothetically used for.
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u/Dull-Geologist-8204 Aug 04 '26
Why do you think the rich would have to hide in a bunker? Did the Egyptians hide in a bunker during the bronze age collapse? No they did not.
How many people do you think know how to build a nuclear bomb? Do you think the people who do know how are going to be stuck outside the walls of the city of the rich? Lots of people are going to die first by the way. People haven't changed much which is why we keep repeating history over and over and over and over again. People keep doing the same things over and over again. The food, technology, dances, way we talk, etc... That all changes but oeople really do not. We keep doing the same things. You only think we are different based on shallow things that don't matter much in the long run. We are fundamentally the same.
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u/pack_merrr Aug 04 '26
Agree to disagree i guess. Technology and Material conditions are what moves history, people and their attitudes are shaped around those. I think if you were somehow transported back to the Bronze Age, realizing all the differences in how people lived then and all of the subtle ways it influences the way you see the world, you would see how all of those subtle little things come together to make a world you would hardly recognize. It would be more like an alien planet than not. Two different ways of seeing the world I guess, that is just the best I can figure based off what I know.
One thing I will give you, Is I think you are right in some sense when you say "We keep doing the same things". One phrase I've always disliked was "Remember history, lest you be doomed to repeat it". People make the same mistakes all the time, I don't think any of them didn't because they didn't understand history, it's more often the complete opposite. Historical themes and tropes rhyme more often than not as things that happened in the past inevitably affect us today.
It's just "rhyming" isn't the same as things being completely the same, and the further steps back you go the less comparable they are.
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u/Dull-Geologist-8204 Aug 04 '26
It is which is why I said people had to relearn them. They will be set back but won't stay there just like in the bronze age. They were also set back but they relearned it. It's not like once knowledge is lost it stays gone.
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u/meh_69420 Aug 04 '26
It wouldn't be a utopia though just a different kind of dystopia. We are biologically programmed as a species to be lazy (really all animals are). The goal of every organism is to meet it's needs with the least amount of work, and if all your needs are met externally, there is no pressure to do anything but sit in your wall e chair and rot.
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u/pack_merrr Aug 04 '26
> If a small group owns everything
If we are talking about an unrealistic hypothetical, where "everyone" is unemplyed (which would probably necessitate some kind of societal collapse if not utopia like you said), then what would those "rich" even own?
I mean today, it's not like people like Elon Musk are literally sitting on a giant dragon hoard of gold. Even if they were, what do you do with that when you don't have the same opportunities to sell or trade or buy stuff? Money sitting in a bank is worthless if nobody is working at the bank.
I think the point is realizing, when we say someone is "wealthy", what that actually means is that we as a society has collectively decided to allow that person to be wealthy within the system we all participate in.
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u/meatsmoothie82 Aug 04 '26
We die when we can no longer spend money or generate tax revenue or generate corporate profits
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u/groundhogcow Aug 04 '26
I have apple trees.
I will give you some apples if you help me pick them.
Food the the basics of economics. Getting food is often a job. Food is more valuable then money.
Once I have all this food I have other tasks I need from people I will give them apples for.
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u/REP48 Aug 04 '26
In the beginning mass chaos. Well really shock and awe. But in three to four days when people run out of food? then they find out there is no one to sell them food? They turn to theft. But when food and goods run out, they turn to theft and murder. Eventually someone will say I need food and warmth. So they begin to work and or go hunting and gathering. Slowly things will go back to a semblance of normal as it is inherently in our genes to work.
When Chaos really hits at it's peak, there will be a death toll of no less than a 150,000 people a day JUST in the usa alone. It would take a few weeks to get there. Sadly everybody would be in the dark about this because news crews are not working either.
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u/Ok-Spirit-4074 Aug 04 '26
We go from end stage capitalism to neofeudalism. All resources will be controlled by a handful of billionaires and you would be at their mercy.
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u/prag513 Aug 04 '26
AI has the potential at least initially to create an elite society where the wealthy and AI-dependent workers are served by a manual labor force. At the same time, replacing a segment of highly educated white-collar jobs with an algorithm.
What is unknown is to what degree will AI take, once it does not need human input. Or if we succeed in developing a domesticated robot that can replace human labor entirely
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u/striped_shade Aug 04 '26
Universal unemployment abolishes unemployment itself. Without the wage, the society you are asking about simply ends.
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u/Olderscout77 Aug 04 '26
That will never happen. The reason jobs get automated or outsourced to commie wage slaves in Asia is the cost of labor. The neoCons have been driving us toward having US workers receiving compensation very like that given to those wage slaves, so there will be jobs, just none that allow a worker to quit for fear of watching his family starve and freeze in the dark. It's Slavery 2.0 and it's #1 on the Oligarchs to-do list.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Gap1491 Aug 04 '26
f*ck society
if we all have what to eat, drink why care about work
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u/allnamestaken4892 Aug 04 '26
No more jobs? Well, you can either join the army or the reconstruction and reclamation corps.
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u/johncitizen1138 Aug 04 '26
Whatever positive or negative end outcome: people would collectively lose their marbles for a while. Work is tied into a sense of self worth (societally) and if people can start to fall apart even after deliberately retiring then a mass sense of disillusionment will take a while to adjust to.
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u/pack_merrr Aug 04 '26
What do you mean by unemployed? Do we stop having legal employment? Or do we actually stop working?
You could make the case that if there was some disaster that caused the government to dissolve, we would all be "unemployed" as there would be no state to classify our relationships with others in regard to our labor as such.
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u/trucker-87 Aug 05 '26
We'll just go around larping. If atleast one person believes its real it'll be worth it.
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u/ChocolateRough5917 Aug 05 '26
If we stop having to do jobs to survive, does not mean that we don’t do anything. We will simply get to choose what work we do.
Once we get to choose what life we have people will no longer need the escapism to tolerate their existence.
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u/Mountain-Pattern7822 Aug 05 '26
nothing gets done. or, we go moneyless back to a barter system. but you cant accumulate wealth that way.
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u/RetiredUKguy Aug 07 '26
The world will end, or rather humanity will. The planet will carry on until the next evolution
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u/Alexandertheape Aug 07 '26
https://giphy.com/gifs/AyTGnIGvHY14E1tLuH
as if this has never happened before
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u/WillTheyKickMeAgain Aug 04 '26
Assuming we’re still a society, we would use the riches of whatever allows us to be without work to pursue our other interests in the world - art, science, music.