Name: What If You Never Worked Again?
Uploaded: 2026-02-05T16:59:41.000Z
Duration: 3 min 38 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Modal verbs - A2

A hard day of work can bring a lot of satisfaction.

But who wouldn't rather spend their time doing whatever they wanted or nothing?

This is just a thought experiment, but I think it's a fun discussion.

Of course, in order to have things like food, healthcare, water, plumbing, electricity, Internet and you know, everything else works, work would have to get done by someone or by something.

Technology has already begun to affect employment and will continue to do so as more and more jobs become automated through things like AI and robotics.

One study estimates that 1.4 million jobs in the US will be lost to automation by the year 2032.

While automation may be making our lives a little easier, it's not making the lives easier of the people who need those jobs.

They're still going to need money even when robots take their jobs.

And we would have to get this money from our robot overlords.

This is called a universal basic income and it's not a new concept.

Many countries, including the United States, Brazil, India and Kenya, have experimented with doing this in some form.

Their studies found that this improved health and education while reducing crime.

But the majority of these trials only included small groups of people, from a few hundred to a few thousand, with income ranging from a small percent of the average income to about $1,000 a month.

In order for this to cover the living expenses of the population of an entire country, governments would have to spend a lot more money.

For instance, in the us while the living wage varies greatly from state to state, the median amount is 67,700 per year for the 258.3 million adults1 living there.

But while a workless world may not be in our near future, we may at least see a small reduction in the amount of time we spend working.

That's right, the five day, 40 hour work week could soon become a thing of the past.

Some countries are trying out or even adopted a four day work week with the number of weekly hours ranging from 32 to 38, all while providing the same salary.

These countries have found that working less can benefit both the employer and the employee.

For instance, one study in Iceland found that working a 35 or 36 hour workweek led to the same or even improved productivity.

Meetings that could just be emails were just emails.

And studies show that fewer working hours benefit employees health and well being.

Obviously, such as reduce stress and exhaustion and improve sleep and family lives.

It may not be the workless world that we're all dreaming of, but

I will take a few extra hours of relaxation each week.

Do you think we're working too much for too little?

Do you think there should be more job replacement programs as automation advances?

Let's have a respectful discussion in the comments section below.

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