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.
8 works give this answer
Atlas Shrugged
In Galt's Gulch everyone does work they chose and trades it freely — a judge bakes, a composer plays, a philosopher runs a diner — and each insists the choosing is the whole point. Outside, the railways stop running because nobody left knows how.
Play as vocationAD-012-PLA·BK·1961The Stainless Steel Rat
Almost nothing, for almost everyone. Society runs so smoothly that crime has become nearly impossible, so the handful of people with the temperament for it commit crimes out of boredom. The state's response is to hire them, because it has no other use for that kind of mind either.
Play as vocationAD-019-PLA·BK·1988Start hereThe 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 vocationAD-022-PLA·BK·1994Start herePermutation City
Peer edits his own desires so that carving table legs becomes completely absorbing, then carves table legs. He is not deluded and not unhappy. He has simply solved the problem of what to want, by changing what he wants.
Play as vocationAD-024-PLA·BK·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 vocationAD-039-PLA·BK·2008Anathem
The avout live in concents under a rule that bans most technology, and their days are timetabled: chant, mathematics, manual work, argument, and the occasional walk. Gates open once a year, a decade, a century or a millennium depending on which order you joined. Outside, the Saecular world has everything and does nothing much with it.
Play as vocationAD-042-PLA·BK·2009Makers
The New Work movement funds thousands of people to invent things in abandoned strip malls, and for a few years it is the best job any of them have had. Then it crashes, the investors leave, and the survivors end up running a ride assembled from the wreckage of their own industry and fighting Disney over it.
Play as vocationAD-055-PLA·BK·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