If economically necessary work declines, what will provide structure, dignity, community, achievement, and status?
Keynes predicted the leisure problem in 1930 and feared it more than scarcity. Danaher's modern version: whether meaning survives when contribution is optional is a design problem for civilization, not an individual one.
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The serious treatments this window reframed the crisis away from unemployment toward meaning: even for those who keep their jobs, work's role in structuring identity, purpose, and community may not survive, and income support cannot answer what people are for. The constructive proposals try to extend status and legibility to contribution that the labor market never priced — caregiving, community, volunteering.
Whether or not you keep your job, the meaning of work will never be the same.
A five-phase near-future scenario arguing the deeper AI crisis is not mass unemployment but the erosion of work's role in structuring identity, purpose, and community — and that income support cannot answer what people are 'for.'
For 250 years, work has helped define what it meant to be an American: productive, self-reliant, useful, and worthy of a place in the community.
Proposes shifting from a 'work economy' to a 'Contribution Economy' that grants status and legibility to caregiving, community leadership, and volunteering — a concrete design answer to the dignity-and-status side of the question.