If machines take most economically necessary labour, relationships become the remaining source of structure and status. That is not automatically a kinder world. Pre-industrial life was relational: gossip, precedence, peer-group enforcement, and belonging that came with exclusion.

Look at people who already lived that way. Versailles courtiers. Upper-class volunteers on nonprofit boards. Working-class urban villagers whose jobs were precarious and whose real life was the peer group. Across class, the pattern is similar. Meaning came from each other. The world was small. Deviance was policed. Usefulness was often an illusion that kept the circle intact.