When I wake up, the sun has risen and only one of my housemates is still at home.
Our house is designed for group living. We each have our own apartments with a bathroom and a private study/workroom, but the kitchen and living room are shared. Architects designed the house to maximize the possibility that housemates would run into each other in the common areas, to promote incidental socialization. I don’t know exactly how they did it, because I haven’t studied architecture yet.
Group houses are just one of the things our society has developed to combat loneliness. Free time helps a lot; people don’t come home from working two jobs too tired to do anything but watch TV. On the ground floor of every apartment building are places for socializing: coffeeshops and bowling alleys, nightclubs and board-game clubs, toddler play spaces and libraries. Dating-site algorithms have been honed to a science, and exist for platonic friends too. There are special programs for people who have difficulty finding friends to meet each other. And, frankly, one of the few things that’s scarce is people who need to be helped: few people want to be befriended altruistically, but it is better than having no friends at all, and it often builds self-confidence and social skills that lead to people becoming genuinely well-liked.
The one housemate who’s still here eats a muffin. We make small talk about how work is going. He likes having more money than most people do– I think it mostly goes to hiring a maid once a week and to his habit of leaving hundred-dollar bills on street corners to watch people be ecstatic about finding them. So he works one of the absolutely necessary jobs that most people won’t do for free. He monitors an automated shoe factory. It turns out tens of thousands of shoes a day and has three employees.
I do some writing. I’m working on an extremely obscure fanfiction with an audience of four people. But honestly becoming more famous would just be tiring. I’m happy pleasing four of my friends and maybe another person who stumbles across it and finds it wonderful.
I’ve put it off long enough: it’s time to start preparing for the festival. Sometimes it seems like every other weekend is a festival or holiday of some sort, although of course you don’t help at every one. Some people do nothing but plan and execute holiday festivals. It seems incredibly tiring and stressful to me, but they just seem to thrive on it.
The upcoming festival is for Geek Pride Day, and I’m signed up to improv a character (they’re from a modern movie, you wouldn’t have heard of it). I run through my spaced repetition deck of obscure facts about my character’s backstory; there’s always one person who takes pride in tripping you up. I note down a few more lines I might want to try using; it’s always a good idea to have some patter scripted out for those routine conversations. My female housemate is making my costume, which is good, because I don’t have a head for crafts.
That evening, I check on my child in the artificial womb. He still kind of looks like a freaky alien, but his vital signs are fine. I pet the glass of his womb; although I know it’s just a reflex reaction, I imagine that he’s waving at me.
Once my son is born, I’m going to set aside a lot of things I currently do to focus on him. That isn’t required, of course; children grow up fine if their parents have lots of hobbies, or even a full-time job of thirty hours a week. But I think it’s really cool to watch a person grow and show him all the good things about the world, and I’d like to be able to focus on that. And it’s not like my projects can’t be put on the backburner. I work a lot because I like to, but most of my work doesn’t pay; I live on my basic income.
Outside the hospital, I meet my girlfriend. She’s a scientist. She’s free to work on whatever interests her, without having to scramble for grant money or p-hack results out of her experiments; all her papers are freely available to anyone who wants to read them.We gossip about how the crowdfunding of CERN’s latest particle accelerator is going. Particle accelerators are expensive enough that they can’t fund it from their basic incomes, the way my girlfriend buys her chemicals. But it looks like there are enough science fanboys with spare cash that it’ll get funded.
We walk two blocks and go past five or six excellent little restaurants before eventually deciding we want to go to the salad place. We live in a dense city, so there’s a restaurant to cater to any taste within walking distance. The salad place is owned by a guy who really really likes making salads. There are also automated restaurants with fast but predictably crappy food, produced by machine. Of course you order with an app and pick up the food yourself. Waiters get paid more than my housemate the factory manager does, and thus are only employed at the sort of restaurant where the bill comes to a thousand dollars or so.
Normally my girlfriend and I would take a late-night walk, but at midnight tonight there’s a show out on the water. It’s pretty crowded, and if you want a good seat you have to cough up a few hundred bucks; people have enough disposable income that inherently scarce things get really really expensive. But there’s always a lot of standing room, and it still looks beautiful from far away.
An orchestra plays. Lights glitter. Fountains shoot water into the air. A mist descends, and rainbow lights dance across it; they resolve into clips of nature, famous movies, the stars. Fireworks explode in the background. The creators are free from worries about hunger, thirst, homelessness, disease; they are free to do whatever they want, and they choose to make beautiful things, to pursue excellence and art for art’s sake, to make things that others marvel at and to marvel at others’ creations in return.
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