This sounds like an emphasis on leisure time. Have you read "In Praise of Idleness" by Bertrand Russell? There was also some debate once about job sharing. It's interesting that there's so little public discussion these days about leisure time. Now it's jobs jobs jobs.

Edit: I have personally seen evidence of people developing opportunities for themselves in their leisure time when they work a few days a week and make an income from it.

Never read it. Thanks for the ref., hope I can find a free pdf somewhere to skim through.

Here: https://libcom.org/files/Bertrand%20Russell%20-%20In%20Praise%20of%20Idleness.pdf

Assuming the system isn’t massively abused what other problems or benefits can you imagine arising. — I like sushi

I imagine a lot more people investing their time in things that give them pleasure and satisfaction. It’s not hard to imagine the knock-on effects of that. What the consequences of having a smaller income are I’m not sure? Quite a lot of money is invested in having a job, transport, clothes, etc.

It used to be, once we had put food on the table it was leisure time. That is when we lived in the Garden of Eden. Once you start destroying God's garden and planting your own that is when you start living by the sweat of your brow.

Leisure time is a difficult thing. We love our weekends and we love the public holidays. It gives us a chance to indulge in our private lives, which generally takes second place to our public life. Family and friends seem to come together more naturally in this extra time. With more time we seem to be able to balance our priorities more effectively. But anecdotal evidence suggests a problem for many retirees with the amount of time on their hands. It’s a similar situation for those on unemployment, though the circumstances have different consequences.

People seem to need something, maybe a challenge, which work supplies. Youths without direction tend to get into trouble, work, even though they might resent it, at least creates a sense of purpose.

So let’s assume only a small percentage of the population take up this leisure time and successfully turn it into an occupation that fulfils them and creates some sort of income. Where would they stand in society, how would they be viewed by the rest, as someone lucky, someone talented and exceptional, or even a separate class to be valued differently than everyone else?

Play without work very soon stops being playful.

You’ve just repeated what I said.

Well there you go. Just 1 sentence would have sufficed then.

If people didn’t need to work for survival, there’s all kind of volunteer work that could be done for some sense of purpose and something to do. And I don’t mean like soup kitchen volunteering necessarily, just doing work on creative projects for free on your own schedule just because it’s something you want to see happen and want to be a part of. And even if most people aren’t creative enough to come up with things to do themselves, a handful of creative people can easily come up with tons of things they could use help with, for which everyone else could volunteer as they like.

I have first hand experience with this in a video game fandom where I started a project that was too big for me to handle on my own and welcomed anyone else’s help with it and for decades now have “employed” dozens of volunteer creative people of all types in collaboratively creating a work of love that’s now one of the biggest things in that community.

I have a bunch of other projects that I would love to do similar things with, I just don’t know how to find the right community to help with them. My philosophy book is one of them (and I have vague aspirations that a community like this one might someday be of use in a future version of that), and I also have an absolutely enormous multipart work of fiction outlined (in 60k words just for the outline) that would take me 30 years just to novelize myself but I would ideally have a huge multi-media work of music, visual art, film, etc (the origins of the story are backstories from abandoned video game projects from over two decades ago). I could easily “employ” an army of volunteers for an entire lifetime fleshing just that project out, if there were people with the time to contribute and I had the time to manage them all. And that’s all just me, one creative person. I’ve met lots of other people with similarly big dreams that could use just as many hands realizing them.

Would this effectively create a world fo freelancing where longterm contracts were disposed of or is there a possibility of this scheme working and effectively doubling employment. — I like sushi

If the scheme has as it primary purpose creating more employment then I think there’s a problem when you begin the scheme by reducing employment, i.e. week on, week off employment. But part of it does remind me of the people who once travelled across the country reading poetry to people who probably couldn’t read and had never heard of such things, and performing plays outdoors, or minstrels singing about love and loss, and all of them earning a small income from it while they spread something beneficial across the land.

I could easily “employ” an army of volunteers for an entire lifetime fleshing just that project out, if there were people with the time to contribute and I had the time to manage them all. — Pfhorrest

The problem is that whatever opportunities exist for people they’re still in need of an income, and it has to be a real income, not subsidised by government.

If they worked week on, week off, they lose half their income.

That post was in response to someone saying that people need work to keep them busy, even if they don't need the income. I agree people need the income, and this half on/half off scheme would leave them needing it even more. But if the income was somehow taken care of, this "people need work to keep them busy" thing wouldn't be a problem, because there's plenty of stuff people need help with if they don't have to be billionaires to pay people to help them with it because people are just bored and looking for projects to volunteer on.

The problem with life is that I can't continue sleeping.