The "monetizable" activities you're talking about here under your definition will still exist in a theoretical world where AI takes over traditional employment. Separating "making a living" from "having a traditional job" wouldn't get rid of any of the social monetization you describe.

This is kind of a side note, but have you never learned an ability or tried to master a skill in secret? There's nothing wrong with being motivated by social capital, but if you extrapolate out from that to assume everyone is primarily motivated that way, you might be universalizing a personal trait that isn't really universal.

There are a lot of things I practice and do alone that never get exchanged for social capital: drawing, I play single-player games, I cook. These are activities where I either master a skill on my own (sometimes purely for the intrinsic motivation of mastering it even though it produces no value outside of that), or because (in the case of things like food/personal-programming/etc) because it produces "value" for myself that isn't exchanged with anyone else.

I'm not saying community and social capital doesn't exist, but if you are defining value purely in a transactional sense, you are missing out on a lot of human motivation. People do things alone without ever entering into a community around those activities or showing the results to anyone else.

Of course! I'm not saying that "everything is for sale" or we always need to contribute to a society. But if you don't do it you may quickly find that your life is boring and you need to share with somebody. Obviously all people are different, some need (or can bear) more solitude, some hate it, but on average we are social animals and it's inside us. Even when you cook for yourself, aren't you ever discussing it with somebody? Hell, why am I typing all this? It has no transactional value for me, none whatsoever, in fact I wasted half of my Saturday :) I could have just created my theories in secret and enjoyed them, but for some reason I need to post here. Maybe because I want to know what other people think, what if I'm dead wrong with my theories? So there is a transactional value even in these posts as I learn something new which may help me later :) No, "later" is not a conscious reason why I'm doing it, it's a subconscious thing, our internal program.

Very rarely? I cook so that I can make food that tastes better to me, because I'm eating it. If every other human being on the planet was dead, I would still be doing it.

Humans are absolutely social animals, but we're not only social animals, and I think it's a mistake to try and compress every human motivation into how it benefits social interactions. Even in larger tasks, there is something intrinsically kind of satisfying about doing something for yourself even if it's fully private. Genuinely, I don't know how to explain the inherent pleasure of researching a useless topic or getting lost in an activity/task that's not going to be shared. I don't think that's something that can be reduced to "well, maybe you subconsciously think it will help you in a future transaction."

I'm getting value out of cooking, sure, but that value isn't really something that can be described in a transactional form or even as prep for future transactions or competitions. Cooking doesn't make me better in other social situations. It doesn't really give me transferable skills. I don't really cook for other people (my tastes are very different from them and I usually doubt they'd like what I cook anyway). I'm not trying to make myself more attractive to other people, I'm not prepping myself for a future competition. I don't think that cooking is going to be suddenly useful in the future in a social situation.

I just want the food to taste good because I eat it.

I think with any of these activities you're talking about, ask yourself, "would someone still do this if every other human being on the planet was dead?" And if the answer with any of those meaningful activities is 'yes', then that suggests that for some people there's something deeper or more instinctual going on there beyond just a subconscious adherence to social systems. There's a lot of stuff that I do that I would still do even if I was never going to interact with another human being for the rest of my life.

I can't speak for anyone else, but that may be more common than you realize? You can define value however you want, but I do think that you're going to subtly miss out on intrinsic motivations if you try to fit all of them into an extrinsic lens. You can theorize that people anonymously donate to charities or build useful things always because there is some kind of transaction at play there or preparation for a future transaction (and some people are motivated mostly by that stuff, which is fine), but universalizing that is not going to give you a good predictive model for how everyone is going to act in the future.