Recently, I wrote that I'm not a big fan of UBI even though Andrew Yang was my guy in the 2020 Democratic Primary. Someone asked me what I thought of a situation where UBI would allow people to live my lifestyle by default and would allow someone like me to double my income. For that to make a lot of sense to you, I have to describe my lifestyle and my income. The second one is easily quantifiable. In recent years I've made somewhere in the neighborhood of $24K a year. That was from a combination of C-Realm Vault Podcast subscriptions, one-time donations to the C-Realm, writing and drawing comics and shooting video at municipal meetings for the local community TV station.
What sort of lifestyle does that support? I have a comfortable one-bedroom apartment. Water and electricity is included in the rent. I pay no utilities other than phone and internet. I do not own a car. Before the pandemic I would rent a car every 3 or 4 months and drive down to Maryland to see my kids. Or I would take Amtrak and rent a car for a day while I was there. The cost worked out to be about the same either way. I figure the train is safer, but the pandemic killed that option, and it still hasn't come back.
These days, I'm not doing much camera work for the TV station, and so I'm mostly here in my apartment, by myself. I do have a cat, so I'm not completely alone. I have two workstations; one for podcast production and one for visual art. I also have a comfy chair that is parked in front of my big Roku TV. I'm sitting in that chair now as I type this post.
I used to be on a pretty consistent self-imposed work routine. These days, I'm pretty disorganized and end up doing long stints of work when I could have taken it at an easier pace if I'd worked more consistently.
Most weekdays (unless I'm fasting), I walk to the drop-in center to get a free take-away meal at mid-day. Prior to the pandemic, you could go inside to eat. I only did that once. They also set out items on a table for people to take home with them. I regularly pick up heads of cabbage, potatoes and carrots which I use to make a soup that sustains me over the weekend. Sometimes there are non-food items like bottles of hand sanitizer or little hotel soaps.
I also walk to the grocery store most days. It's weird. I don't eat dinner. Breakfast is usually just a cup of yogurt with flax seeds and psyllium husks stirred in, and lunch is free, and yet somehow I still end up spending a lot of money at the grocery store. I buy coffee, heavy cream, and salad greens. I also get my household supplies there. Laundry detergent, cat litter, toilet paper, and the like. Most days I'll buy a small snack and a couple of times a week, I'll buy a couple of tall cans of very cheap beer, and this comes to about a hundred bucks a week. With that lifestyle and my monthly child support obligation, I'm out of money by the end of the month.
I used to go to the gym 4 or 5 days a week, but COVID killed my gym. I do some exercise here at home, but it's not equivalent to the benefit I got from the gym. Going to the gym also brought me into social contact with other human beings. My work at home routine is very poor in human contact.
Andrew Yang was proposing a $1K a month UBI. That wouldn't double my income, but it would certainly make life more comfortable for me. I've lived close to the edge for a very long time, so I'm used to it, but I imagine that I would feel more at ease with a bit of a financial buffer between me and financial dysfunction. I actually enjoy the process of walking to the drop-in center, not knowing what my meal will include when I get there. It's not any sort of gamble, but there is an element of suspense and surprise to it. I can see myself continuing to go there even when I have enough money to buy all my own food. I imagine making a monthly donation so that I'm not saving any money by going there, but I keep the routine and the modicum of human contact I get from the exercise.
A UBI of $2K a month WOULD double my income, and that would be a very significant change for me. With that kind of income, I would feel confident hitting the road to pursue the digital nomad lifestyle in countries where it costs a lot less to live. I've fantasized and planned this for quite some time. I think about Mexico and the Philippines, because Mexico is right here and because I've got someone waiting for me in the Philippines. After that, there's Vietnam, where prices are VERY low relative to the quality of life. The same is true of Georgia. I'd love to spend 6 months in Tbilisi. But really it's Central and South America that are calling to me; Columbia, Argentina, Paraguay, Ecuador, and possibly even Venezuela one day. Maduro can't last forever. I've been to Peru 4 times, so I don't see myself heading back there anytime soon.
That's how I see my own life changing under the blessing of a generous UBI, but what about the part of the question that deals with people being able to live the way I live now without holding a job or pursuing any of the self-employment activities that I use to keep a roof over my head and food in the fridge. The typical worry is that young people spend all day playing video games and smoking weed. Personally, I think there are worse fates.
The person who asked the question suggested that the best part about employment is that it has the potential to provide autonomy, purpose and mastery, but in my experience those jobs are few and far between, and I think my interlocutor would agree. Most wage-earning jobs (as opposed to salaried jobs) are so routinized and micro-managed that there is very little opportunity to exercise or experience autonomy. Perhaps it reflects a lack of imagination on my part, but I don't see running a cash register at Wal*Mart or making sandwiches at Subway as much of a vital field in which to manifest a sense of purpose. Mastery? Maybe in the short term. I imagine that I would be pretty nervous making those sandwiches in the first few days on the job.
Video games, on the other hand, are designed to be challenging, to establish a series of goals to achieve so that you feel a sense of accomplishment as you pass each milestone. The numerical score shows you exactly how much better you've gotten with time and practice. You might call that a simulacrum of mastery, but how meaningful is the mastery of the tools of the debt-collection trade or mastery of the menu at Denny's?
Achieving a genuine experience of autonomy, purpose and mastery will probably require getting off the well-trod life paths, both in the current neoliberal landscape of McJobs and in the imagined world of UBI. Most people will do what's easy and obvious, and they will live unremarkable but not-terrible lives. They may waste decades on the couch alternating between bong and game controller, but you know what has reliably provided men with the most meaningful and purpose-filled experience of their lives? War. Fighting alongside a band of brothers to keep one another alive in the service of your country provides ample opportunity to experience autonomy, purpose and mastery. It also inflicts physical and psychic wounds that never fully heal.
Perhaps a life "wasted" on weed and XBox isn't such a huge tragedy after all.
