Sometimes I feel like work is the meaning life. From a certain (simplified/badly poetic) view, living existence exists just to, and because it can, battle against the 2nd Law of Thermondynamics, and that sort of just trickles all the way up to our complex social existence. If you're only increasing entropy by hanging out and resting on your laurels (again, simplified), rather than making/creating, you're sort of waste from the aforementioned perspective.