Sounds like the problem there is more with shitty dictatorships. Leave it to a few evil assholes to ruin a good thing. But even in best case scenario of giving everyone the freedom to use the entirety of every day the way they want, it’s going to be a very, VERY mixed bag. There will be folks who literally spend the rest of their life watching TV or some other form of idle entertainment, but if that’s how they want to spend it, more power to em. I’d guess the majority of folks would engage in some form of arts just to have an outlet for creativity. Relatively few would turn to academics and pursue research for the sole sake of finding answers; but even that relative few would count for something… I think most important would be the kinds of things people study. Today we have a TON of talent wasted on finding clever new ways to blow each other up, or enshittifying the web, or perfecting the psychology of advertisements… if those people were all focused on, say, climate change… then we might not be in the whole planet-on-fire situation we’re in now.

Speaking of, we’ll probably be extinct before we figure out how to pull our political heads out of our asses anyway. Humanity actually living up to its potential is locked into the “wouldn’t it be nice if…” category.