Millions of people are unhappy at their jobs. If one could just "drop out", stop working, and be provided a decent home, enough food, and medical care some percentage of those unhappy workers would do it. People with homes and jobs actually resent homeless people, which, if you think about it, is a really weird reaction to have, eh?
I'm a Bucky Fuller fan since childhood, so I've talked to a lot of people about using technology to set up a kind of utopia (economic, not political) where everyone's basic needs are met, and often folks ask, "But who would pick up the garbage?"
There's a lot to unpack there. But the underlying assumption is clear: without the threat of destitution and vagrancy no one would do the unpopular or unpleasant jobs.
I could go on, I could cite Freud's "Civilization and Its Discontents"[0], or talk about the Indian Wars et. al. and the tension between the New World and Old World cultures, the stigma attached to "going native", and the hideous efforts to remake indigenous people in the image of the colonist. Or we could talk about how mainstream culture tends to revile the "hippy", the "dropout" who just wants to be at peace and live in harmony with Nature.
Long story, really, but yeah, the bottom line is that we have the technology to make a kind of secular economic utopia nearly overnight, and our problems now are mostly psychological or social.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_and_Its_Disconten...
> Freud enumerates what he sees as the fundamental tensions between civilization and the individual. The primary friction, he asserts, stems from the individual's quest for instinctive freedom and civilization's contrary demand for conformity and repression of instincts.
