I am old enough and lucky enough to have witnessed one alternative in person. I was able to visit the USSR in the 1980’s and work in Moscow in the 1990’s. This not a plug for Soviet style Communism, just an observation on (then) Muscovites’ daily lives. As the expression went “we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us”, their job did not define their life. Far from it

”I worked in capitalist Russia, which was actually communist”