I'm so bored of "OH NOES Robots and AI are stealing our jobs", when it should be "Robots and AI are finally liberating us from our jobs".
It's up to you to get those things, or whatever things you crave. It's not like anything you originally owned has been taken away from you if you don't manage to do that.
That is a huge generalization, which seems intuitively wrong: why have norms towards conforming if they aren't effective?
I'm talking about the fact that the unemployed will face drastically lower qualities of life, or even life threatening situations. That this is acceptable comes from government policies, which in turn come from social norms. It's seen as okay to harm the unemployed, deny them healthcare, or let them starve. They're lazy, and they should be punished.
I won't speak for others, like you're doing, but conforming socially is the primary reason I work. I've been unemployed before, and I lost social status from it. It was embarrassing to admit to it. It was like losing a central part of my identity.
Social norms are important, but often you won't notice till you deviate from them.
How exactly do you "provide for yourself". You can't just go out and stake a claim to land anymore. The mechanisms for "providing for yourself" are purposefully limited to those sectioned and allowed by social norms. If you want to split hairs other "providing for yourself" please tell me of ways to do this outside the system.
If people didn't do their jobs there wouldn't be any food, homes or healthcare. People work not because of a social norm, but in order to solve each other's problems.
Note how ubiquitous work is: people engage in it across all cultures with otherwise highly diverse social norms.
The nature of work is really diverse across cultures. Hunter-gatherers hardly do any. Rural cultures have most people farming. I think about 1% of people in the USA are farmers.
Most jobs in the West are, well, bullshit jobs. Busy work. We do them despite the fact we could feed and house everyone with perhaps 9/10 people not working. It's merely a social expectation that we should all work, and a preference, not a necessity, to punish those who don't.
This seems like grasping entitlement. High productivity in farming or construction does not automatically give you the right to demand that they hand over their food or houses. Their preference to share their output in an exchange is not a punishment - it's reciprocity. If it wasn't for the prospect of exchange, why would anyone ever make more of anything than strictly what they needed? They could be hanging out with friends and family instead of catering to the needs of strangers.
> We do them despite the fact we could feed and house everyone with perhaps 9/10 people not working.
There is plenty of other problems to solve like cancer, diseases, global warming, clean energy, access to space and unfortunately in many places still housing and food. Claiming that people no longer need to work is like saying that we have run out of problems to solve. That this is it. That this is the world we want.