Disagree. Withdrawing from family is a pure loss. Who cares about work. Maslow is a red herring here. You hunt for food for your family, you build shelter for your family, it all goes back to your local community.
"Work" in the Silicon Valley (and more generally corporatist) sense, has nothing to do with community, with making a better life, or with family, just pure productivity for the bottom line. I would argue that that's not even really work.
Imagine if all of the workaholic middle managers in the world couldn’t work sixty hour weeks and had to go home and shut off their work phones after 35 hours… just think of all of the meetings and reporting that wouldn’t have to happen if they were forced to use their limited time wisely.
Anyway, I think a significant majority of people would have no idea what to do with their lives if you took away their jobs and provided them with food/shelter/entertainment. For better or worse, our jobs are a huge part of how we conceptualize ourselves.
This seems to be why a lot people feel much more fulfilled when then venture out into nature for a decent amount of time. The things they do there directly impact their survival. I agree that people do need work in that sense.
If anything, businesses have allowed us to spend way more time with family than we would if we actually had to hunt / farm / gather for food. Our quality of life is so absurdly high exactly because of our economy. I think people forget what it would take to survive without society.
That is untrue. There is ample evidence that hunter-gatherer societies have more leisure time than industrialized societies. Just to name two sources I've recently read: Harari covers it in Sapiens, and before that Mumford covered it in Technics and Human Development.
After all, as you say, people are only buying things to benefit their families, so how do they manage to be parted with their money on what you posit to be useless frivolities produced by the tech industry?