In a Sane Society, Endless Leisure is Dystopian

In the essential text of the Humanistic Psychology movement, The Sane Society, Erich Fromm defines mental health as,

… the ability to love and to create, by the emergence from incestuous ties to clan and soil, by a sense of identity based on one's experience of self as the subject and agent of one's powers, by the grasp of reality inside and outside of ourselves, that is, by the development of objectivity and reason.

He goes on to shock our modern sensibilities:

Mental health cannot be defined in terms of the 'adjustment' of the individual to his society, but, on the contrary, it must be defined in terms of the adjustment of society to the needs of man.

In other words, mental health does not reside within an individual at all. It resides within the transaction between an individual and a healthy or unhealthy society:

A healthy society furthers man’s capacity to love his fellow men, to work creatively, to develop his reason and objectivity, to have a sense of self which is based on the experience of his own productive powers.

By contrast:

An unhealthy society is one which creates mutual hostility and distrust, which transforms man into an instrument of use and exploitation for others, which deprives him of a sense of self, inasmuch as he submits to others or becomes an automaton.

Fromm published these words in 1955. Born into an Orthodox Jewish family Germany in 1900, he trained as a psychologist and psychoanalyst and emigrated after the Nazi rise to power, first to Switzerland and then to the United States. Over the decades, he devoted his career to arguing for the idea that mental health entirely depends on whether society can meet universal human needs (relatedness, transcendence, rootedness, identity, and purpose), and support the essential capacities to love, reason, distinguish truth from falsehood, create, and develop an authentic self.

Humanistic psychology was never the most “scientific” of subfields within the discipline. But after 25 years as a psychological scientist, I’ve come to realize that it might be the most impactful.

This is especially the case in 2026, a digital age in which we seem to move further away from human needs and values, and closer towards becoming automatons, as Fromm warned: in the service of economic growth, expendable and valued only for our ability to produce efficiently or be optimized to do so.

What does The Sane Society teach us about these times of ours? Without doubt, it shows us that the ideas floated by many a tech billionaire for solving the oft-threatened AI-driven jobs apocalypse are literally insane.

These ideas and schemes usually involve some combination of Universal Basic Income for the new permanent underclass, open access to AI capacities via “Universal Basic Superintelligence” (a supposedly less dystopian, AI-based form of UBI), and a simple harvesting of heretofore unknown abundance and health in a world of unending leisure.

I don’t buy these predictions of abundance because, quite simply, the reasoning behind them is pie-in-the-sky weak. Instead, I think the chilling possibility of an economy of reverse centaurs is much more likely. We’re already seeing it become reality in our “gig economy” in which people are literally cogs in the machine.

However, whatever the technical challenges of achieving abundance are, they will pale in comparison to the psychological challenges of living well in a society where many people risk falling into the existential vacuum created by the loss of opportunities for meaningful work; and where the benefits of social capital, like trust, recognition, and status that allow us to achieve ambitious goals, become increasingly concentrated among only the most economically powerful.

Purpose emerges from constraints, more than unfettered freedom. Responsibility, effort, discipline, and the ability to create and contribute is what makes life worth living. It doesn’t look the same for everyone, but as Erich Fromm first taught us, the need is essential for all. We need good work, and better work than many of us have, not just less of it.

In her New York Times opinion essay, Jasmine Sun spoke to AI workers contemplating the future they’re helping to create:

Many A.I. employees are ultimately motivated by visions of a beautiful future: a promised land where goods are cheap, diseases are cured, and abundant machine labor liberates humans to enjoy lives of infinite leisure. But increasingly, they also worry about triggering a jobs apocalypse along the way. “There are some people who care about jobs and inequality because they really care about people. There are others who think this is going to lead to instability, insurrection and revolution, and that’s bad for business,” said a researcher who has worked at two frontier A.I. labs, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of professional retaliation.

Tech-lash is in full swing in large part because we have woken up to the fact that the people we are increasingly referring to as “tech oligarchs” don’t really understand anything about human sanity. If anything, they’re actively working against it.