Quote Originally Posted by Lauront View Post
I also think it's a little silly for other reasons - plenty of humans are content to live their lives focused mostly on entirely hedonistic pursuits, yet the way the story is written, we should be heading to a dead end ourselves as we eclipse sources of suffering and are able to focus more on leisure. I remain committed to the idea of doing so, particularly with ills like ageing, and I found the story to be rather juvenile, as you say, in how forced a caricature the Plenty seemed to be... could these individuals not invent ways to keep their minds occupied? Even so, the setting has a star-centric system of reincarnation, so it's not like life on their star wouldn't one day rekindle (Meteion aside.)
Indeed. The game tries to treat a post-scarcity as its the worst thing ever. Like, if humankind isn't struggling for subsistence, then we're decadent. I think one of humankind's worst self-inflicted tragedies was convincing itself that leisure was not a basic human right.

We live in an age where work is glorified and sanctified above all else. I remember being in a conference recently where they demonstrated that most people who work in office shifts spend about 20% of their time pretending pretending to work or finding some other form of what the speakers called "meaningless work". Just work for work's sake, because otherwise they would be fired or their pay/jobs would be cut. They must "work" even if that work ultimately means nothing.

Leisure is a basic human need that gets a bum rap.