There is a particular restlessness in accomplished people. Not the restlessness of want, they have enough, often far more than enough. It is the restlessness of someone who has climbed the mountain and arrived at the summit only to find the view oddly unsatisfying. The mountain was the goal. I know this restlessness intimately; not as an observer, but as a survivor.
For close to thirty years, I operated at the pinnacle of an organisation: the decisions, the authority, the accumulated gravitas of reputation and standing that takes a working lifetime to build. Then, overnight, it was gone. Demolished. I found myself at the very bottom of a social order I had spent decades near the top of, stripped of position, of dignity, of identity. Worse than stripped—I was placed, by circumstance and the brutal arithmetic of institutional disgrace, in the company of criminals: men accused of violence, predation, and theft. Murderers. Rapists. Paedophiles. Felons of every variety. Five years at the absolute floor of the human hierarchy. What I discovered in that abyss is the argument I want to make. And it is not a gentle argument.
In the 21st century, we are rapidly approaching the civilisational threshold where Artificial Intelligence is dissolving the ancient equation between human labour and material survival. Machines will do what humans have done in the material world. The productive problem, the scarcity problem, the problem that has organised ten thousand years of human civilisation, that problem is being solved. What remains, raw and unavoidable once the material question is answered, is the question that the material question was always masking: what are we actually here for?
The answer to that question is harder, because it does not live in economics or policy or institutional design. It lives in the bone; in what I saw at the bottom of the hierarchy that you can never see clearly at the top. What I saw was this: the man at the pinnacle and the man in the gutter are, in every essential way, the same. The same fears. The same hungers. The same capacity for generosity and cruelty, for courage and cowardice, for love and its absence. The external architecture—the title, the salary, the deference of subordinates, the corner office, the prison cell—is almost entirely irrelevant to the interior life. Strip it away and what remains is a human being, no more and no less remarkable than any other, navigating the fundamental challenge of being alive.
This is not a comfortable observation for those invested in the hierarchy. It was not comfortable for me. It was, however, liberating in a way that no promotion had ever been. Because if the hierarchy does not confer essential worth, if the man at the top is not actually more alive than the man at the bottom, then the worth was never in the hierarchy to begin with. It was always somewhere else. And once I understood where it actually was, I understood something about human happiness that decades of success had obscured from me. My fulfilment, I came to see with absolute clarity, rested solely on my attitude. Not my circumstances. Not my position. Not the judgement of institutions or the verdict of the social order. My attitude. The disposition I brought to the day. The quality of attention I gave to the person in front of me. The choice, made afresh each morning, to engage with life as it was rather than as it was supposed to be. That choice, that singular, unconditioned, inalienable choice turned out to be the only freedom that could not be taken away. Everything else, I now know, can be.
But temper this insight with the conclusion reached by studies on the psychology of scarcity that found something that should give pause to anyone who locates fulfilment purely in attitude: genuine material deprivation – the constant pressure of not having enough – does not merely make life uncomfortable. It consumes cognitive bandwidth. The mental load of managing poverty is so demanding that it demonstrably reduces the capacity for the kind of long-range thinking, creative engagement, and emotional generosity that fulfilment requires. Superabundance is the first material condition in history positioned to remove that tax altogether.
I am at a kerbside waiting for transport. A few metres away, a man is selling balloons. He was pitching to every passerby with that peculiar mixture of hope and humiliation that belongs to the informal economy. Time passed. Not one person stopped. Not one coin changed hands. Then a woman approaches with her daughter, a slip of a girl. The girl was crying. The child sees the balloons and stops crying with the instantaneous, total emotional pivot that only children can manage. She asks her mother to buy one. The mother refuses and yanks the girl’s hand, pulling her onward. The child resists; the mother keeps pulling. At this point, the vendor steps forward. He selects a balloon and gives it to the girl. The look of happiness that crosses the girl’s face is lost on the mother but not on the vendor. The mother tells her daughter to give it back, saying she will not pay for it. The man looks at the girl smiling, and then at the mother, and says Let her keep it; you don’t need to pay. As the vendor turned back, I saw a look of contentment on his face. Fulfilment is not what you accumulate; it is what you give, and what you become in the act of giving. It is not the summit; it is the quality of presence you bring to wherever you happen to be standing.
In 2010, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman published a study suggesting that emotional wellbeing rises with income only up to around $75,000 a year, and then plateaus. The finding was widely embraced as scientific confirmation of what wisdom traditions had always said: beyond sufficiency, more money does not buy more happiness. But a 2021 study by Matthew Killingsworth, tracking 33,000 people using real-time experience sampling, found something more complicated: for many people, happiness does continue rising with income well beyond that threshold. The relationship is not simple. The research on wealth and wellbeing pulls in multiple directions, which ought to make us humble about any clean thesis.
What does seem consistent across studies is that the “way” money is used matters more than its quantity; that spending on experience, on relationship, and on others produces more lasting satisfaction than spending on accumulation. The balloon vendor, giving from his scarcity, was running that experiment in real time. So, in their way, were the lottery winners studied by Philip Brickman in the 1970s, many of whom reported, within a year of their windfall, levels of happiness indistinguishable from where they had started.
At the very dawn of civilisation, before the agricultural revolution locked humanity into surplus extraction, hierarchy, and the brutal logic of specialised labour, human beings lived in what anthropologists now describe as conditions of relative abundance. Hunter-gatherer societies worked, by most estimates, between three and five hours a day to meet their material needs. The rest was story, ritual, relationship, play, the sacred. Marshall Sahlins famously called them the original affluent society. Not because they had much, but because what they had was enough.
Then agriculture happened. Surplus happened. Ownership of surplus happened. Forced acquisitions and expansion of territories happened. Hierarchy to protect ownership followed. The state, organised religion, specialised labour—the whole apparatus of ten thousand years of civilisation—followed in succession. And at the end of that long chain, accelerated to its logical extreme by industrialisation, stands the modern human being: materially extraordinary, temporally bankrupt, spiritually malnourished, spending the majority of waking hours doing things they would not freely choose to do, in service of a system whose primary output is more of itself.
What artificial intelligence now makes possible, genuinely possible, is a return to that original condition of sufficiency, but without the vulnerability. The hunter-gatherer had enough time but no floor of security. One bad season, one injury, one failed hunt, and the abundance evaporated. Superabundance, properly distributed, provides the floor that early humanity never had. It is the original human condition plus the accumulated knowledge of ten thousand years, plus security. This is not going backwards. It is the spiral of history completing its first great turn and arriving somewhere recognisably related to the beginning but at an entirely different altitude. We are being offered the chance to be, again, the beings we always were beneath the industrial overlay.
Throughout all of recorded history, the pursuit of the examined life – reflection, creativity, learning, genuine relationship, spiritual depth – has been a privilege of leisure. And leisure has been a privilege of position. The great spiritual seekers who found time for the interior life were monks, aristocrats, the independently wealthy, or those so thoroughly dispossessed that the world had accidentally freed them from its demands. Everyone else, the overwhelming majority of every human generation that has ever lived, was too tired. Too hungry. Too busy surviving or serving those who were not. Fulfilment, in its deepest sense, was rationed by economic circumstance. The wisdom traditions knew this was wrong. Every one of them, Buddhist, Vedantic, Stoic, Sufi, insisted that the capacity for awakening, for joy, for genuine flourishing was universal, belonging to every human being regardless of position. But the material conditions mocked that universalism. The teaching was available to all; the time to receive it was not.
Superabundance breaks that lock, or could break it, for the first time in ten thousand years. In Bhutan, the government has been measuring Gross National Happiness since 1972, tracking psychological wellbeing, cultural vitality, ecological health, and time use alongside economic output. The index is imperfect and the politics of Bhutan are complicated, but the experiment has surfaced something interesting: the country consistently ranks high in reported life satisfaction relative to its income level, and surveys identify domains like community belonging and contact with the natural world, not income, as the strongest predictors of that satisfaction.
The Nordic countries offer a more troubling counterpoint. Materially among the most secure societies ever to have existed, they rank consistently among the world’s happiest populations. And yet suicide rates in these countries, particularly in Finland, remained stubbornly high through much of the twentieth century, and rates of depression and anxiety remain significant. Material sufficiency, it appears, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for flourishing. The floor matters. But what you build above the floor matters too, and that question – what a life freed from material desperation should be “for” – is one that prosperity alone cannot answer.
The great risk of the Age of Superabundance is that we will use the extraordinary productive surplus of artificial intelligence to build a more elaborate version of the same mistake: that we will mistake abundance for flourishing, comfort for joy, the removal of want for the presence of meaning. That we will digitise the industrial era rather than transcend it. The gravitational pull of three centuries of industrial conditioning is not loosened by prosperity. If anything, prosperity tightens it, because prosperity provides more sophisticated forms of the same distraction. A man with nothing has been stripped of every illusion about where meaning lives. A man with everything has more illusions available, and better ones, and he can afford to maintain them indefinitely.
The great spiritual traditions knew this. Voluntary simplicity was not self-punishment; it was the removal of the furniture so you could see the room. Experiments with Universal Basic Income (UBI) offer a cautious glimpse of what the freed-from-want life might actually look like. In the Finnish pilot of 2017–2018, recipients reported meaningfully higher levels of wellbeing, trust, and life satisfaction. This suggests the floor does what its proponents claim.
But the picture from other experiments is less clean. In some UBI pilots, recipients struggled precisely with the question that a floor without a ceiling poses: not Can I survive but What am I for? The removal of work structure – its rhythms, its social contact, the identity it provides – left some participants not liberated but adrift. This is an argument that the floor is the beginning of the question, not its resolution. The same pattern appears in retirement research. People who retire into purposeful activity – voluntary work, creative projects, sustained learning – show better health outcomes than those who retire into leisure alone. Purpose, it seems, is not the absence of demand but the presence of chosen engagement.
Education offers a parallel question. In South Korea, students compete with ferocious intensity, yet the country has one of the highest suicide rates among young people, driven by academic pressure. Education, narrowed to credentialing and stripped of its deeper function, is not the examined life; it is the industrial process wearing academic dress. Meanwhile, in Reggio Emilia in northern Italy, a pedagogical tradition rooted in curiosity and community has produced evidence that learning oriented around flourishing produces people who are not only happier but more genuinely capable. The two models coexist; the question is which one we choose to scale.
The deepest obstacle to democratised fulfilment is not, I suspect, material. It is the internalised belief that depth, leisure, reflection, and joy are not for people like them. That meaning is earned by productivity; that rest is laziness; that the examined life is self- indulgence. This belief is the sediment of history. And sediment, given time and current, does move. The balloon vendor on that kerb already knew everything I have argued here. He knew that fulfilment is not a destination you reach when the conditions are finally right. It is a practice. A daily, unconditioned, sometimes costly practice of showing up fully for the life that is actually in front of you, not the life you planned, but this one. Now. The weeping child. The unpurchased balloon. The gift made freely from an inventory you can barely afford to give away.
I, at the bottom of my own abyss, found the same truth from the opposite direction. Not through giving, but through the enforced removal of everything I had mistaken for myself. What remained, once the furniture was gone, was not diminished; it was clarified. The attitude. The quality of attention. The unconditioned choice, made each morning regardless of circumstance, to be fully present in the life that was actually happening. That clarity is the most valuable thing I own. It cost everything I had, but I would not trade it. Superabundance gives us the material conditions that the balloon vendor did not have. It can free billions from the grinding tyranny of want. But the Nordic data and the Korean education system all point to the same truth: abundance without wisdom about what to do with freedom is not liberation; it is a larger, more comfortable cell.
The direction that wisdom points has been known in every tradition: not toward more, but toward depth. Not toward ascent of the hierarchy, but toward full inhabitation of the life you are actually living. Not toward the corner office, but toward the kerbside moment when a child stops crying because a man with nothing gave everything he could. We have always known this. The tragedy of the industrial era is not that it was cruel, but that it was so loud, for so long, that we could not hear what we already knew. The machines are about to go quiet. For the first time in ten thousand years, every human being may have the material conditions to hear it too. What we will do in that silence is the question that no technology can answer for us. It is, perhaps, the only question that ever mattered.