Maybe your mom would, I'm sure she's a lovely woman.
But I know from hard experience that a lot of people wouldn't. My ex lost her job at some point and was looking for a year for a new one. She became terribly depressed, just staying in bed and crying all day. I'd talk her out of it, she'd be OK for a while, and then get depressed again because she felt "useless" and "like a loser".
I encouraged her, again and again, to go out and get a basic job even if it was menial, like waiting tables, or to volunteer for something, or to learn new skills, so at least she'd have something to do. But she refused to even look for jobs that weren't fancy middle class office jobs, volunteering was out of the question and her attempts at learning new skills were half-hearted at best.
Jobs aren't just a source of money. They're a source of validation, every day. Take away the job and people don't magically become perfect citizens who spend all their time doing generic good. They can become lethargic and depressed. As, in fact, the article articulates w.r.t. the French system.
I've had long-term unemployment as well (over 18 months) and I think that is an entirely different phenomenon that's not connected to what people would do if they had some financial security of a basic income.
Long term unemployment creates a type of inaction/depression for some people (this happened to me, and it sounds exactly like what happened to your ex partner). Because so much of my identity was bound up in what job I had, what career goals, how much money, etc., it made the feeling of being unemployed severely distressing. I really wanted to do things like volunteering, or even basic self-care like exercising, but I could not due to the distress of unemployment and the feeling like I absolutely had to find an "acceptably good" job (for social status) and neurotically do nothing but dedicate all my efforts towards that.
If the status of having a basic income is a positive thing, like framing it as an opportunity to pitch in with civic duty and give back, I think it would satisfy the status and "sense of accomplishment" requirements for a lot of people.
But either way, the extremely distressing feeling of long-term unemployment is really not comparable. I would say, for example, that what you observed from your ex partner does not give you any capability of predicting what your ex partner would have done with basic income during that unemployment period. The situations are just too drastically different.
> My ex lost her job at some point and was looking for a year for a new one. She became terribly depressed
Typical optimistic UBI visions would see a person like that stop looking for a job so hard and start some form of UBI-enabled self employment as the closest simulacrum of that fancy middle class job (that may turn into a full replacement or not, but even just keeping the business net positive could already feel like a small success). Easy to say from a distance, but surely more of an incremental path than job hunting could ever be.
But I know from hard experience that a lot of people wouldn't. My ex lost her job at some point and was looking for a year for a new one. She became terribly depressed, just staying in bed and crying all day. I'd talk her out of it, she'd be OK for a while, and then get depressed again because she felt "useless" and "like a loser".
I encouraged her, again and again, to go out and get a basic job even if it was menial, like waiting tables, or to volunteer for something, or to learn new skills, so at least she'd have something to do. But she refused to even look for jobs that weren't fancy middle class office jobs, volunteering was out of the question and her attempts at learning new skills were half-hearted at best.
Jobs aren't just a source of money. They're a source of validation, every day. Take away the job and people don't magically become perfect citizens who spend all their time doing generic good. They can become lethargic and depressed. As, in fact, the article articulates w.r.t. the French system.