To be fair though, "a life doing useful things you aren't getting paid for" doesn't roll so trippingly off the keyboard.
In fact, the examples that the author cites were manifestly not useless at all even on the criterion that money is the ultimate measure of utility. In the one case, the work produced a book which, one presumes, some people bought, and in the other case, art (music) that people at the very least went out of their way to listen to, and possibly even paid for. (I've never been to a punk rock concert, but I presume that at least some of them had cover charges.)
Interestingly, caring for one's parents used to be an unpaid activity, and still is in non-industrialized countries. But there has been a successful transition to paid (albeit poorly) work as far as older parents are concerned, in industrialized countries such as the US and the UK (I do not think this is a popular phenomenon in Japan and Korea AFAIK).