Most people work but most dont necessarily have to, at least as much as we do. People enter the "rat race" because it gives them something, not just a source of money but other achievement and identity stuff.

I think a lot of those incentives are changing. My take on work is that it's getting more exploitive, more administrative, less fun and less satisfying. Between politics and policies and management, work is asking much more, not physically but in terms of behaviors and beliefs. It's a new kind of exploitation we haven't really faced before. And it's my theory anyway that a lot of people have had enough.

A simpler way to say it is that more people would rather exist outside society, in a sense, and do their own thing, than put up with all the BS that comes with working for someone else. Even if the pay is worse. I bet most Uber Eats drivers make less than fast food employees, but I also bet they have less non work corporate BS to deal with, and outside whatever algorithmic unfairness can work as they want. In corporate jobs, the situation is magnified because the requirements of conformity are much greater, but so generally are the options.