A friend of mine retired early and spends a lot of time in his workshop building fun things for himself. That is work, but it's not "work" in the way people think of the term.
One project I want to do some time is design and 3D print a model roller coaster, including building a train to travel over it. That's work, but it's not employment.
I used to believe that when I was young, and that's pretty much the argument I made to my dad, who responded that most people would rather stay home, drink beer, have sex, and watch tv.
As I've grown older, I've come over to my dad's side, as I learned that most people don't have a creative bone in their body, have no desire to be productive in any way, and would rather spend their time entertaining themselves and consuming above almost anything else.
At least that's the case in much of the US, which is heading relentlessly towards the world predicted by the movie Idiocracy. Maybe in some other countries it's better.
Plenty of people dream of doing these sinful, consumerist—not manly, Hacker News-productive—things because they are the rewind from work pasttimes; they’re the off-time-from-work things that many people just plain need in order to be able to must the energy for another workday. But the fallacy here is to assume that a reality without work is the same. It clearly isn’t though if these things are used to recuperate from work. What if there was no work to recuperate from? I don’t know if they would do manly HN things like implement yet another JS framework, but they would probably do other things than whatever they do in order to recreate themselves right now.
> most people work stupid jobs because they can't afford there risk of doing what they actually want
Again this projects some kind of strong desire for a specialized low-demand sort of work on the greater population. This is a fantasy.
Work is a vector for people to contribute to society and participate in it, allows them to find validation, to compete (if they so choose). Whether a job is "stupid" is a rationalization that betrays the fact that there is demand for it. At best, it can be unenjoyable, but most people don't "hate" their job. Arguably people have stronger feelings about commute time, which is a greater reflection of faults in city planning.
What a vacuous side-point to make.
But anyway, that is not relevant in the world we have today. Today people are required to work, no other option is given, and if this doesn't satisfy their need of feeling useful, they are just forced to go without and face the desperation that deprivation from a basic need leads to.
Just this revolt of people against pointless job is evidence enough that if people could choose, they would do something different from "work" as we have today. You can argue this is a good thing, but you can't argue it's business as usual.