I’ve been stuck on a question that I don’t feel most discussions about post-money or post-scarcity societies really confront.

Even if traditional money became much less important—because of automation, basic provisioning, or some other structural shift—scarcity would not go away. Location, specialized healthcare, education with limited mentors, trust, human attention, safety, and time would still be constrained.

So the question I can’t stop thinking about is not “how do we get rid of money,” but rather:

What replaces money as a coordination mechanism for scarce resources, without collapsing into coercion or arbitrary privilege?

Many discussions seem to assume either that people will “just do the right thing,” or that scarcity will somehow dissolve entirely. Neither feels convincing to me.

This is where I started exploring, somewhat uncomfortably, the idea of a life-credit system.

The rough intuition is simple, but troubling: instead of using money, people accumulate non-monetary credits based on participation across multiple domains of life—things like maintaining health, learning and teaching, contributing work, caregiving, social reliability, and general non-harmful participation in shared systems.

Those credits could then be used to access scarce goods or higher-priority services.

I don’t find this idea comforting. I find it unsettling. But I keep coming back to it because I don’t see an obvious alternative that scales.

A major objection I immediately ran into was:
“Why would anyone accept these credits?”

If they’re just symbolic, they fail immediately.

So in the version I’ve been thinking about, providers would accept credits because the credits upgrade their own position inside the system—priority access to inputs, operating permissions, network access, scheduling priority, or similar non-cash advantages. Without this, the system collapses.

At this point, the idea starts to feel powerful enough to be dangerous.

On the surface, there are things that feel attractive about it, and I’m suspicious of myself for noticing them:

• It makes invisible labor legible—care work, mentoring, stability, reliability.
• It rewards maintenance of social systems, not just extraction or output.
• It provides an explicit rule for allocating scarcity, instead of pretending we don’t do that already.

But the deeper I go, the more the ethical tension sharpens.

The system only works if participation is incentivized.
But the moment non-participation is punished in ways that threaten survival or dignity, the system stops being voluntary in any meaningful sense.

This is the point where I keep getting stuck.

If opting out carries no consequences at all, the system seems unstable—vulnerable to free-riding and erosion, especially in societies already facing care shortages or demographic collapse.

If opting out carries serious penalties, then even a well-intentioned system starts to resemble soft totalitarianism. Not because anyone explicitly wants control, but because incentive gradients quietly become coercive.

I don’t know how to resolve this.

One partial solution I’ve been considering—but don’t trust yet—is separating baseline rights from expansion privileges.

In this framing:

• Basic survival, shelter, essential healthcare, and legal dignity are unconditional.
• Credits never determine whether someone gets to exist safely.
• Credits only affect access to scarce upgrades—priority, quality, speed, or exclusivity.
• People can formally opt out of participation without punishment, but they also don’t receive priority access.

Intuitively, this feels like it preserves a right to refuse while still allowing coordination.

But I’m not confident it actually holds over time.

I worry that:

• Social meaning will attach to scores even if formally discouraged.
• Political pressure will reshape what “counts” as contribution.
• Intimate life choices (relationships, reproduction) will become indirectly coerced even if never mandated.
• Surveillance will creep in under the banner of fairness and accuracy.
• “Optional” participation will become optional only on paper.

At the same time, I don’t see how societies can indefinitely rely on participation—care work, stability, mentoring—while treating non-participation as morally neutral in all respects.

That feels dishonest too.

So I’m not proposing this system as a solution.
I’m trying to understand where the contradiction is unavoidable, and whether any incentive structure can exist that:

• coordinates scarcity,
• recognizes non-market contributions,
• and still preserves a genuine right to live differently—or not participate at all.

I’m especially interested in identifying the assumptions I’m probably smuggling in without noticing.

Questions I’d like critique on:

• Is there any coherent incentive system here that doesn’t eventually become coercive?
• Does the “baseline rights + optional priority” split actually remain stable over time?
• Where do you think the most dangerous hidden assumption is in this line of thinking?

I’m much more interested in understanding why this might be impossible than in defending the model itself.