I wasn’t expecting much from this book, but holy shit. It’s about humanism in an automated age. It will change your life.

It’s been a few years since I’ve read a book from cover-to-cover, but I recently picked up this newer non-fiction book called A Nice Humble Abode with Running Water by Joshua Nicketta* *and, ever since I finished it about a week ago, I genuinely haven’t stopped thinking about it.
It dives into how deeply normalized it’s become in American and industrial cultures to just trade away our absolute peak physical and mental years, working 65+ years for a distant retirement where we're finally given liberty enough to enjoy life. The premise is essentially this: why the hell have we collectively decided that the ideal human life is to spend the majority of our healthy adult years working so that we can eventually afford to stop working?
While it isn’t a manifesto and doesn’t necessarily offer a solution to late-stage industrialization, the author discusses with incredible clarity the incentives behind this approach. It’s not at all a vague complaint that fails to address any root causes or possible courses of action; Nicketta points out specific political and historical drivers (he actually brings up the Space Race as a wild example of how public ambition and systemic incentives get engineered) that keep us locked into this loop.
It’s important to recognize that people aren't sacrificing their lives out of pure and selfless civic duty. There are other self-interested influences at play that accidentally fuel the massive communal network required to keep millions of people fed, housed, and alive.
Where the book gets really interesting (and slightly terrifying, but ultimately optimistic) is the second half, which is all about automation. Automation is fast approaching a point where it wipes out the necessity of this massive labor collective entirely. The author makes a pretty bold claim that if automation takes over all major industries, which it almost certainly will at its peak, the system has to be collectivized to prevent near-total societal poverty. He makes a point to distinguish this from Marxism, focusing on avoiding a nightmare scenario where a handful of tech/corporate executives hoard 99.9% of the world's wealth while everyone else is priced out of survival.
If we actually undergo that transition safely, then we end up returning to pure humanism and art. At the point where baseline survival and labor are completely automated, money and even old-school bartering become irrelevant. We get forced back into doing things simply because they are human, and the only alternative is to rot away and die.

Has anyone else stumbled across this one yet? I’d love to hear thoughts on his thesis and where his model might fall short. It all feels rather utopian, but given how fast tech is moving, maybe a radical rethink is the only realistic way forward. Either way, I truly think this book made me smarter and gave me a much needed vocabulary for a feeling I couldn’t quite articulate before.