And before you shrug and go “great, jobs are bullshit”:
Jobs, for all their cruelty, provide:
•structure (“I know where to be at 9”),
•community (office friendships, shared memes, gossip),
•identity (“I’m a nurse / teacher / carpenter,” for the lucky ones),
•a script (“I know what next year roughly looks like”).
Take that away and you don’t get instant utopia. You get a psychic freefall.
Imagine millions of people waking up one day structurally unnecessary to the economy, with no replacement narrative in place. Not “You’re free now,” but “The system doesn’t know what to do with you, please manage your own despair.”
That’s not liberation. That’s cruelty on a scale our nervous systems are not built for.
Think about Appalachia when the textile mills closed. Everywhere.
I am in the same camp as you and I think most people will be as well. We all have heard about the person who retired with no hobbies and no purpose who just drinks beer and watches TV all day. This i think is more rare than this article suggests. I also think the younger you are the easier the switch would be because you would have less time for a job to break your spirit.
I have found that purposely working less and caring less has allowed other interests to grow.