Even if political and business leaders turned benevolent all of a sudden and tried their hardest to bring forth a post-scarcity economy, there's a pretty fundamental problem in the way. Most people actually do need to work to feel valuable and needed, and would hate pursuing leisure and learning without having about 20-25 hours/week of work. This is actually mentioned in Brave New World, as the Controller is describing the history of their social system. It was discovered that people became less satisfied when work hours were reduced below about 4/workday; the state had to respond by creating unnecessary work to keep people happy.
I suspect the same is true in the real world, although most UBI trials so far have gotten abandoned midway through for no good reason, so it's hard to come up with any good conclusions. There may still be some information from recipients of welfare and disability benefits, versus people in similar situations who did not obtain them, although I haven't really plunged into the literature enough to draw any conclusions.
It is possible that our society's cultural preoccupation with work is responsible for a lot of the problem, but I can't imagine it's all of it - humans in every society have been under social obligations to spend a decent share of their time contributing to the group's welfare, although the nature of the obligations and time off from them have varied greatly between hunter-gatherer, pastoralist, agricultural, and industrial societies. I strongly suspect that most people do not respond well to having no obligations to provide for themselves and loved ones, and that it triggers a kind of existential despair that can only be partly covered up by electronic entertainment, drugs, gambling, sex, etc.
