imagine that the concepts of money and scarcity vanished overnight, all around the world, and you had the time and energy to spend on what really mattered to you
What really matters to us is, necessarily, scarce. You wouldn't care about your life and your time alive of you had multiple lives or lived forever. You wouldn't care about your family if you had any number of children you wanted, at no extra cost. This planet wouldn't be that important if we had an entire galaxy at our disposal. Art wouldn't matter if talent and ideas weren't scarce.
Your hypothetical is not only hypothetical, but also contradictory.
@tripu That's quite a negative way of looking at things! I think it says a lot about what you find valuable, because care for things or other humans is not, for most people, an inverse function of how replaceable they are.
If we had a guaranteed sufficient-to-our-needs access to food, water, and shelter, we'd still form attachments and connections to things in our lives.
You made me realise that in a universe without scarcity, beings capable of suffering (humans, many animals) would still be valuable to us, because sentience is what gives moral worth to things. (Even then, how much would any being actually suffer if there were no scarcity of nutrition, shelter, medicine, entertainment, etc?)
About things, of course we value stuff (ideas, objects, resources) just because they're scarce. Just think of the few things that are virtually free and unlimited in our current universe. We don't even notice rocks, bits, numbers, the air above our head, noises, natural light — we wouldn't sacrifice anything to have one more unit of any of that (ie, we wouldn't pay any money), because there's almost zero scarcity there. If you're tempted to discard these examples because they sound ridiculous (“come on, I'm talking about important stuff here, of course nobody cares about the number 711 or values an individual grain of sand”), notice that they seem ridiculous precisely because there is plenty of those things. My point is that if nothing were scarce, nothing would matter.
@tripu I think theres a solid argument that nothing does "matter", in the sort of cosmic sense that no matter how many shiny rocks we collect, we can't take it with us when we die. But, we can try to create a better world for the people who come after us, and for ourselves, which might look like conducting research, teaching, writing, creating, healing, exploring - and so forth.
❤️ I very much sympathise with that. I'm an effective altruist and I try to think carefully about those things.
Mine was just a (pedantic) point about scarcity being an inevitable component of reality — and even a necessary one, since scarcity is what makes us value things in the first place.
I think the most plausible instance of your original proposition is: being ultra-rich. That's as close as one can possibly get to abolishing scarcity (for oneself, of course). It's the closest we can get to being free to take care of what really matters to us…
@tripu I think thats a mistaken perspective, because of course wealth/money is not intrinsically real - its only as real as we collectively decide it to be. As a species, we could organize ourselves differently, and I'd argue more productively, if we gave ourselves the freedom to do that. Yes, there is a reasonable limit on hany resources we can distribute, there are finite quantities, but not ones that we can't work around if we organize around that, I believe.