Play as vocation
Work becomes hobby, and the serious people go looking for risk on purpose.
The optimistic case, and the only one that produces societies you might want to live in. Nobody has to do anything, so people compose, build, study, and play — and the culture treats these as real occupations rather than hobbies.
Banks is unusually honest about the catch. A Culture citizen's work is play with good public relations, and the novels keep their plots by following the small minority who join Contact and Special Circumstances, because interfering in less advanced civilisations is the last activity with genuine stakes. The utopia is real; the stories still have to leave it to happen.
Egan takes the same premise somewhere stranger: if you are software, you can simply choose to find mathematics enthralling, and run at whatever speed suits. Which raises the question the pattern never quite answers — whether satisfaction you can edit is satisfaction.
3 works give this answer
The Player of Games
Compose, study, design ships that will never be built, gland recreational drugs, play games at a professional standard. A small minority join Contact, because interfering with less advanced civilisations is the only remaining source of real risk.
Play as vocationBK·1997Diaspora
Mathematics, for pleasure, at whatever subjective clock rate suits. Some run slow to let centuries pass, some run fast, some fork themselves to pursue two interests at once.
Play as vocationBK·2016We Are Legion (We Are Bob)
Unlimited time, unlimited copies, no material needs. The Bobs take up engineering projects, science-fiction references, terraforming, and looking after a species of primitives they grow fond of. Boredom is the only real antagonist.
Play as vocation