Sounds like projection, then. I chose to take 6 months off between contracts, and within a week I was bored. That period turned out to be the most productive period when it comes to my open source projects, and those projects now have thousands of users who find them useful. Most people want to feel accomplishment, appreciation and a sense of responsibility, and many people create or work towards that end.
I have a friend I made in college who is now on disability. She's using the time to learn and create, and preparing to start a business teaching others what they know. They could easily smoke weed and play video games all day, but that gets old very quickly.
Is that why stock trading and memecoins skyrocketed during the period where stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment benefits were rolled out? Or why video games reached record player counts during the pandemic (sure sounds like people who had nothing to do all day decided to play video games instead of do whatever productive thing you think they would have done!)?
And to add on to that - what makes you think UBI simply won't cause rents to go up to match? We have strong evidence from the current inflation situation that broad based wage gains get eaten up by price increases of goods with limited supply (i.e. the housing situation in every coastal city). Existing UBI experiments aren't widespread enough to materially shift the housing market. You can't go off evidence from giving a few hundred people extra money. And basic economics tells us that oligopolies (the rental market in coastal cities) extract all consumer surplus (the UBI money) because an oligopoly is not a properly functioning market.
I have a friend I made in college who is now on disability. She's using the time to learn and create, and preparing to start a business teaching others what they know. They could easily smoke weed and play video games all day, but that gets old very quickly.