I used to work at wal-mart in their tire center. That was the happiest I've ever been at a job. I was good at it, it wasn't too challenging but oddball things happened often enough to make it interesting, I got to BS with my co-workers all day and spend time outside when it was nice out. The only problem was it didn't pay.

The job I have now pays better than anything else I've found by a lot (still can't afford a house) but I hate pretty much every aspect of it. It's almost entirely playing the middle man on a bunch of different projects between users and vendors doing interpersonal shit that I hate dealing with and yet, am still somehow better at than most of my peers... It's not like it's hard work, it's just emailing and phone calls and meetings all day and most of the difficulty comes with the bean counters and c-levels changing course spontaneously without regard for what we're currently working on.

If myself and people like me didn't have to force ourselves into these positions out of desperation I think a lot of them would disappear, or at least be left to the middle management types that thrive on feeling like they're in charge of things and leave us to do the technical shit that we're made for.

And how many want to be entrepreneurs but can't because they lose their healthcare. Sometime something entrepreneurs backbone of economy.

I think that if we had good UBI, people will naturally gravitate towards niches they are suited for. People who like the ocean, will be able to wait for a job opening to become available and slot in, rather than forcing themselves into being an indoor grocer. Those who care for children, will be able to take the training and be on a waitlist for local childcare facilities.

Without the race to earn money just to live, people can afford to wait for a place where they belong.

I think there are more people than there are meaningful jobs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

Well documented that there's a ton of make-work and very little value add to quite a bit business bureaucracy.

The most successful businesses are often those that operate as make-work mills and gatekeepers, rather than material value-adding firms.

Whether that means we have a ceiling on meaningful work, or we simply don't have anyone doing critical tasks, is an open question. But given our volume of waste and our profound lack of public services, I'm willing to bet a lot of high value labor is neglected in the race to fabricate opportunities for rent seeking.

Let’s do universal basic income, make the essentials free, and let people live life.

What you are proposing is wildly unrealistic and not even Communism espouses the idea.

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." - Karl Marx / Étienne-Gabriel Morelly / whoever else.

It doesn't say "From each according to their desire, to each according to their want." and that's because no society that hasn't reached Star Trek replicator levels of post-scarcity could survive such a plan.

As Frederick Hicks noted "There are no issues with this principle as long as there is enough of everything for everybody. But this is not the case and probably never will be, because "man's wants tend always to outstrip his ability to supply them.... [Therefore] it will be necessary to have an agency for determining relative amounts of men's needs."

In most societies today the determining Agency is the Free Market via the value of your labor. In a Communist (Marxist?) society that Agency would be a Committee of Workers but in either case there exists, and must exist, a mechanism to stop the free loaders and abusers.

This isn't a defense of today's hyper-capitalist societies either, we need to be doing far better at reigning that shit in and taking care of people. It is however a push-back against the idea that existence should be without cost and that anything requiring effort needs to be enjoyable.