Note: This is a research note supplementing the book Unscarcity, now available for purchase. These notes expand on concepts from the main text. Start here or get the book.
The Stagnation Problem: What Happens When Survival Stops Being the Point?
Why post-scarcity’s greatest threat isn’t economic collapse—it’s existential boredom
The Billionaire on His Yacht, Sobbing Into His Champagne
Here’s a puzzle that should keep economists drinking late into the night: Why do some of the wealthiest people on Earth—those who have already “won” the survival game—end up anxious, depressed, or desperately searching for meaning in ayahuasca retreats?
Aaron Walker started 14 companies before he was 27 and retired a multimillionaire. He had the beach, the freedom, the wide-open schedule we all fantasize about while stuck in traffic. And he was miserable. “I took the focus off myself and put it on other people,” he later explained, describing how he clawed his way back to purpose through mentoring others.
This isn’t an anomaly. It’s a pattern. And it’s the pattern that haunts every vision of post-scarcity: the Stagnation Problem.
The Survival Problem asks: How do we keep people alive? The Stagnation Problem asks something scarier: Once they’re alive and comfortable, how do we keep them wanting to be?
Solve only the first, and you’ve built a very comfortable coffin.
The Mouse Utopia That Ate Itself
In 1968, ethologist John Calhoun built paradise for mice. Universe 25 was a temperature-controlled enclosure with unlimited food, unlimited water, unlimited nesting material. No predators. No disease. Mouse heaven, engineered with the precision of a Swiss watch.
The colony grew rapidly at first. Then things got weird.
As the population increased, social roles broke down like an IKEA bookshelf under too many philosophy books. Males stopped defending territory because there was nothing to defend—food was everywhere. Females abandoned nests. Aggression spiked, then collapsed into a strange passivity. A group Calhoun called the “beautiful ones” emerged: sleek, well-groomed mice who did nothing but eat and preen. They didn’t mate. They didn’t socialize. They didn’t fight. They just… existed.
Think of them as the Instagram influencers of rodent society: aesthetically perfect, completely hollow.
By day 600, the colony was in terminal decline. By day 1,588, it was extinct.
The lesson that gets quoted is: Abundance breeds decay. But that’s the wrong lesson. The mice didn’t die from abundance. They died from purposelessness combined with overcrowding and no exit. There was no frontier. No challenge. No variation. No reason to strive. The system solved the Survival Problem so completely that it created the Stagnation Problem—and had no answer for it.
Human history is littered with similar collapses. Rome’s bread and circuses. The decadent aristocracies of pre-revolutionary France. Every “idle rich” syndrome that turns golden heirs into aimless addicts. Abundance without purpose isn’t utopia. It’s a velvet coffin with excellent catering.
The Existential Vacuum: Frankl’s Prophecy
Viktor Frankl survived Auschwitz. He watched his family perish in the camps. And from that impossible darkness, he extracted an insight that illuminates our brightest futures: Meaning is more essential than survival itself.
In the camps, Frankl observed that physical strength or luck didn’t predict who survived. Those who made it often had something to live for—a manuscript to complete, a child to reunite with, a truth to tell. “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how,” Frankl wrote.
After liberation, he developed logotherapy—the “Third Viennese School” of psychotherapy, following Freud’s pleasure principle and Adler’s power drive. Frankl argued that the fundamental human motivation is neither pleasure nor power but meaning. And he diagnosed a distinctly modern disease: the existential vacuum.
“Ever more people today have the means to live,” Frankl observed, “but no meaning to live for.”
He identified its symptoms in what he called “Sunday neurosis”—the despair that creeps in when work’s distractions fade and people face themselves. We fill the vacuum with shopping, Netflix binges, doom-scrolling, substance abuse, rage politics. None of it works. The vacuum just gets hungrier.
Frankl was writing in the 1950s. The vacuum has only grown since—while we’ve gotten remarkably good at distracting ourselves from noticing it.
The Numbers Don’t Lie: Abundance + Meaninglessness = Crisis
Here’s the paradox that should terrify anyone designing post-scarcity systems: as material conditions improve, psychological conditions often don’t. We’ve been running an unintentional experiment in affluence for seventy years, and the results are in.
The 2025 mental health picture:
- Nearly 1 in 10 U.S. adults experienced a mental health crisis in the past year, with rates hitting 15% among young adults (18-29)
- Over 57.8 million U.S. adults (22.8%) are affected by mental illness, with over 1 billion people affected worldwide
- 40% of U.S. high school students report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness—with 57% of girls exhibiting symptoms of depression
- Housing instability correlates with 37.9% mental health crisis rates—proving material security does matter, but isn’t sufficient
The wealthiest societies in human history are producing epidemic levels of depression, anxiety, and purposelessness. We have more entertainment than any civilization before us. More comfort. More options. And more people asking, “Is this all there is?”
This isn’t a bug. It’s a feature of systems that solved for survival without solving for significance.
Why Cash Won’t Cut It: The UBI Trap
Universal Basic Income advocates have the right instinct—people shouldn’t starve because robots took their jobs. But UBI commits a category error: it treats the Stagnation Problem as if it were the Survival Problem in disguise.
Giving people cash ensures they can buy food. It doesn’t give them a reason to get out of bed.
Studies of unemployed individuals consistently find lower well-being even when financial security is maintained. The structure, identity, and meaning that work provides matter independently of income.
Finland’s basic income experiment (2017-2018) offers the clearest evidence. Recipients received €560 monthly regardless of employment status. The results? Recipients were happier, less stressed, more trusting of institutions, and reported fewer health problems. But employment rates barely budged—basic income recipients worked only half a day more than the control group in the first year. People felt better—but they didn’t automatically find purpose.
Cash is a necessary component of transition. It’s not a sufficient vision of destination. It solves for survival. It doesn’t solve for significance.
The Unscarcity framework distinguishes between two problems that must be solved differently:
- The Survival Problem → The Foundation (unconditional access to essentials)
- The Stagnation Problem → The Ascent (earned access to significance)
Solve only the first, and you get Universe 25 with better Netflix. Solve only the second, and you get our current meritocratic hellscape where purpose is gatekept by survival anxiety. Solve both, and you might get something worth calling civilization.
The Japanese Have a Word for It
While Western researchers were developing scales and surveys, Japanese culture embedded purpose research into a single elegant concept: ikigai (生き甲斐)—“that which makes life worth living.”
Unlike Western conceptions that emphasize grand purpose or career success, ikigai includes the small daily reasons to exist: morning tea, seasonal festivals, tending a garden, perfecting a craft. The Japanese understood that meaning isn’t just about world-changing achievement—it’s about the texture of daily life that makes getting up worthwhile.
The Ohsaki Study followed 43,391 Japanese adults over seven years. Those without ikigai had:
- 50% higher all-cause mortality risk
- 60% higher cardiovascular death risk
- 90% higher death from external causes
Read that again. Purpose doesn’t just make life feel worth living. It literally keeps you alive. The difference between “having a reason to wake up” and “not having one” shows up in obituaries.
Critically, this isn’t a culture-specific finding. American studies show similar mortality reductions for those with strong purpose. Purpose appears to be a universal human need—the Japanese just happened to name it and the Ohsaki researchers happened to measure it. We’re all wired the same way: without a reason to exist, we start not existing.
Three Pathways Out of the Vacuum
Frankl identified three ways humans realize meaning:
1. Creative Values (Contribution)
Making a difference through work, creation, or achievement. The artist finishing a painting. The engineer solving a problem. The caregiver transforming someone’s day. The coder who makes software that helps strangers live better.
2. Experiential Values (Connection)
Finding meaning through beauty, love, nature, culture—being moved by a sunset, sharing a meal with friends, experiencing transcendence. The moments when life feels like a gift rather than a task.
3. Attitudinal Values (Chosen Response)
Transforming unavoidable suffering into growth. Finding dignity in how we face what cannot be changed. The cancer patient who writes letters to their grandchildren. The bereaved who finds a way to carry the lost forward.
Notice what these don’t require: survival anxiety. You can pursue all three from a position of security. In fact, security often makes them more accessible. The house cleaner struggling to make rent doesn’t have much bandwidth for transcendence. She’s too busy worrying about next month.
The Stagnation Problem isn’t that abundance eliminates meaning. It’s that abundance eliminates the default meaning that survival struggle provided—and if we don’t consciously design alternatives, people fall into the vacuum. We’ve been so busy running from the wolf that we never learned what to do when the wolf stopped chasing us.
The Unscarcity Solution: Infinite Games + Decaying Power
The Unscarcity framework attacks the Stagnation Problem on multiple fronts, because a single-point solution would fail against a multi-dimensional challenge.
The Ascent of Significance
The Ascent is where scarcity remains real and meaningful: interstellar exploration, consciousness research, curing aging, creating art that moves civilizations. These are genuinely limited opportunities that require genuine contribution to access.
The key insight: artificial scarcity is corrosive, but natural scarcity of frontier opportunities is motivating. We don’t need to manufacture struggle through poverty. The universe provides plenty of real challenges. Mars isn’t going to colonize itself. Aging isn’t going to cure itself. The Riemann hypothesis isn’t going to prove itself.
Impact Points (IMP) and Decay
Impact Points are earned through validated contribution—to science, art, care, philosophy, governance. They grant access to Ascent opportunities. But unlike money, they decay (approximately 10% annually).
Why decay? Because permanent achievement creates permanent hierarchy. Impact decay means yesterday’s contributions don’t entitle you to tomorrow’s influence. You can’t coast on a single success. The Nobel Prize you won in 1985 doesn’t make you the gatekeeper of physics in 2045. The game continues.
James Carse called this an infinite game—played not to win and end, but to continue play. The Ascent is designed as an infinite game: challenges that matter, without a finish line that renders everything afterward meaningless. The goal isn’t to cross a line and declare “I win.” The goal is to keep playing, keep contributing, keep climbing.
Multiple Pathways to Purpose
The framework deliberately legitimizes diverse forms of contribution:
- Care work: Elara in the book spends 40 years caring for dementia patients—and this counts as fully as frontier research. Caregiving is contribution to human flourishing.
- Art and beauty: Yua writes poems about flood disasters; her work earns Impact. Beauty matters.
- Community building: Maintaining the social fabric that makes the Foundation work. Someone has to keep civilization feeling like home.
- Exploration and discovery: Traditional “prestigious” contributions, but without monopolizing meaning.
There’s no monoculture of what “counts.” The Stagnation Problem emerges when society recognizes only one form of significance (usually economic productivity). The solution is pluralism: many games, all valid. The caregiver and the physicist can both hold their heads high.
Civic Standing and Service
The Civic Service pathway ensures everyone has a starting point for Ascent participation. Complete a period of service—infrastructure maintenance, care work, ecological restoration—and you receive both Civic Standing and an Impact Point Seed.
This solves the “First Credit Problem”: how do you earn your first contribution points if you need points to access contribution opportunities? The answer: service provides universal entry. Nobody is born locked out.
The Real Lesson of Universe 25
Here’s what Calhoun’s critics miss: the mice had no exit. No new territory to explore. No variation in challenge. No frontier. The box was the whole world, and once the box got boring, there was nowhere else to go.
Human history shows a different pattern when abundance is paired with meaningful projects. The Renaissance exploded from Florentine wealth combined with religious/artistic mission. Open-source software emerged from programmers with stable jobs pursuing intrinsic challenge. Every golden age combined material security with cultural purpose. Every collapse combined abundance with purposelessness.
The mice didn’t die from having enough food. They died from having only enough food—and nothing else.
The Unscarcity framework is designed to provide the “else.” The Foundation handles survival. The Ascent handles significance. Together, they close the existential gap that kills societies—the gap between “I’m not going to die” and “I have a reason to live.”
What Maria Discovered
In the book, Maria Delgado starts as a 35-year-old house cleaner in Detroit, scrubbing toilets while worrying about her daughter Sophia. By 2048, she’s 58, living in the Bay Area, and painting every morning.
Not because someone handed her a brush and said “be fulfilled.” But because the Foundation freed her from survival anxiety, and the Ascent gave her a pathway to contribute. She earned Civic Standing through service. She developed her art over decades. She found meaning not despite post-scarcity, but because post-scarcity gave her the space to discover what she actually wanted to become.
For twenty years, Maria’s knees memorized the pattern of a thousand strangers’ bathroom tiles. She never had time to ask what she wanted—survival demanded all her attention. The Foundation didn’t give her meaning. It gave her permission to search for meaning. And search she did, for three years, until the artist she’d always been finally had room to exist.
Maria’s story is the answer to the Stagnation Problem in miniature: abundance isn’t the enemy of meaning. Abundance without design is the enemy. Design for purpose, and abundance becomes liberation.
Conclusion: The Harder Problem
Solving the Survival Problem is an engineering challenge. Fusion, robotics, AI logistics—difficult, but tractable. We can see the path. The equations work. The prototypes exist.
Solving the Stagnation Problem is a design challenge. You can’t engineer purpose into existence. You can only create conditions where it’s likely to emerge: freedom from survival anxiety, access to meaningful challenge, recognition of diverse contribution, communities that matter, frontiers worth exploring.
The mice had a survival utopia. They needed a meaning utopia—and Calhoun couldn’t give them one. He could control the food supply; he couldn’t control the soul.
We can do better. We have to do better. Because abundance is coming whether we design for it or not. AI doesn’t care about our philosophical readiness. Robots don’t wait for our existential preparation. The Labor Cliff is approaching, and the question isn’t whether humans will have their material needs met. The question is whether, once they do, they’ll have any reason to care.
Build the Foundation without the Ascent, and you get a planet of beautiful ones: sleek, comfortable, and hollow.
Build them both, and you get civilization.
The Foundation solves the Survival Problem.
The Ascent solves the Stagnation Problem.
Together, they solve for humanity.
References
Academic Research
- Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946)
- Self-Determination Theory: Deci & Ryan (1985)
- John B. Calhoun, “Population Density and Social Pathology” (1973)
- James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games (1986)
- Sone, T. et al., “Sense of Life Worth Living (Ikigai) and Mortality in Japan: Ohsaki Study,” Psychosomatic Medicine (2008)
Finland Basic Income Experiment
- Finland’s Basic Income Experiment 2017-2018 Results - Ministry of Social Affairs and Health
- Universal Basic Income Experiment in Finland - University of Helsinki
Mental Health Statistics (2024-2025)
- Mental Health Crisis Hits Nearly 1 in 10 U.S. Adults - Johns Hopkins
- Mental Health Crises and Help-Seeking - Health Affairs Scholar
- U.S. Mental Health Statistics 2025 - The Global Statistics
- Mental Health Statistics - USA Health Sciences
- Mental Health by the Numbers - NAMI
Related Articles
- The Survival Problem — The prerequisite challenge
- Universe 25 — The cautionary tale
- Infinite Games — The philosophical framework
- Purpose Beyond Survival — Deep dive on meaning psychology
- Impact — The currency of contribution
- The Ascent — Where significance lives
Book Chapters
- Unscarcity, Chapter 1: The Two Problems
- Unscarcity, Chapter 2: Universe 25 and the Meaning Crisis
