At Paracelsus Recovery, I often sit across from people who have everything you could ever imagine needing, and yet that ‘safety-net’ does not seem to save them from pain. In most cases, it exacerbates it. In fact, a pattern I see time and time again is this: someone with more money and time than most of us could imagine, who is free from the grinding obligation that exhausts so many of us, and yet they are trapped in a depression they can’t shake and a relationship with substances that has taken hold of their life.
They know it makes no sense, and it tortures them how ‘ungrateful’ it makes them seem. And yet, they just can’t find the point of their life, and the pain that causes is so immense they can’t see why they shouldn’t just party and use. What else am I good for, they ask. Even when they try to install some routine it feels arbitrary and pointless, like performing something everyone secretly knows is going nowhere. As one person painfully put it to me, “if I disappear, the gap would close quickly and cleanly.” The substances are not the problem, they are the solution to that ache.
I find myself thinking of these conversations whenever I hear that AI is set to replace workforces and UBI is arriving as an inevitable answer. The UBI vision is a genuinely humane one: free people from survival mode and they will flourish; the artist can create, the parent can be present, the exhausted worker can finally rest. There is real good here and I don’t intend to dismiss it.
But it is not the full picture, and there are uncomfortable questions attached to it that we are collectively too afraid to ask. At Paracelsus Recovery, we work with people already living that life, and what we see is more complicated than the vision tends to allow. I cannot repeat it enough times; the absence of financial pressure does not, on its own, produce flourishing. What it produces is space, and space is only as good as what fills it.
Then, there’s the reality that, for most of human history, what filled that space was work. We are tribal creatures, and what gets forgotten in that observation is that tribes didn’t live together because they liked one another; they worked together first, and the living together followed. Everyone had a function and everyone was needed. That history runs deep: people with strong social bonds and a felt sense of meaningful contribution have a fifty percent higher survival rate than those without. In contrast, unemployment, even when financially cushioned, is consistently linked to higher rates of depression, cardiovascular disease, and early death.
So if UBI is coming, the question is not whether to do it, but how to do it without hollowing people out in the process. I think the answer, unglamorous as it is, is community. Not charity or busywork, but the actual experience of being someone that other people are depending on: showing up to something, contributing to something, being missed when you don’t.
The village elder who keeps the oral history. The person who runs the youth football on Saturdays not because they’re paid to but because fifteen kids will be standing in a car park if they don’t. The neighbour everyone knows to call in a crisis. These roles sound small but they are psychologically enormous, because they answer the question that UBI cannot: whether or not someone needs me here.
This is why the UAE’s position in the AI transition feels so significant. The Gulf has never been a region that waited for the future to arrive; it has always had a habit of building it. But what made that construction meaningful was never the infrastructure alone, it was the shared project behind it, the sense that an entire society was straining toward something together. That spirit may be exactly what the next chapter requires worldwide.
In other words, the opportunity here is that the UAE has both the resources and the cultural instinct to build the structures of mutual dependence alongside the economic transition rather than as an afterthought to it. To treat purposeful contribution not as a nice addition to the UBI conversation but as the whole point of it. The nation that manages to do that won’t just have solved an economic problem, it will have answered one of the most pressing questions of the 21st century.
Source: Khaleej Times