And even more evident when you need to decide how to set up a bureaucracy, paperwork, and verification to judge whether someone else could be working more, or just not

Unclear. But eventually, people would work. People get bored, it's nice to have something to do, and get paid extra on top of it.

UBI just ensures that if they don't like a job, they can just quit, rather than be forced to keep working on pain of starvation.

Tests so far seem to be fairly positive about it working. People who get UBI aren't likely to sit on that money, they'll just go and spend it either paying back debts, or buying something nice for themselves, so the money will keep going around (just look at the COVID economic stimulus packages). They might even spend more than they might otherwise have, if they're not just scraping by.

If that was the case, they would have asked the question you did. But they didn't. They asked a different question. You're assuming their intent based on your own preconceptions. A common cause for miscommunication and confusion.

You heard what I meant and I appreciate that. It was poorly phrased and I wish I had explained the theoretical better.

I qualified it with the "naturally industrious" thing because I wanted people to talk about what they'd do after they slept off the drudgery of current capitalism not immediately upon finding out they don't have to go to work anymore just to survive and have basic amenities. As you stated, I could have also phrased in an equally bad way where everyone just pointed at their job and said "I have no time or energy". That's the problem. I was trying to filter out the "If I had UBI, I would smoke weed and eat potato chips all day" answers.

If I had phrased my question as, "if you had a guaranteed income and were able to use 40hrs a week of your time to make the world a better place, what would you do?" That would have been better.