Gainful employment includes thousands of people in the industries of serving and delivering poisons in bars. Building strip malls in redundancy for inevitable obsolescence and decay. Manufacturing, vending, and distributing unnecessary consumer products just to satisfy desire, the businesses of extracting resources from the Earth in order to perpetuate it, and the numerous advertising and marketing agencies that exist in order to stimulate interest.
I went to Goodwill recently for pots and pans. The person in front of me was buying old porcelain clowns and hideous trinkets.
We have hundreds of different cereals, brands of shoes, innumerable channels of entertainment; variations that have minimal impact on our livelihood and happiness apart from affording something to momentarily attach our otherwise restless awareness onto.
And the narrative is construed such that not participating renders one into someone who is 'lazy' or not pulling their weight. Yet the weight is mostly superfluous.
During Covid, much of society was closed down – and we were fine, albeit many of us lost jobs that hinged not on the necessities of survival, but upon necessary employment in order to have tokens to survive. We had quiet time with our families and had the opportunity to enjoy simple presence. Regardless of the manipulative political scenario or the unpleasantness of illness, it was like a cosmic author used a variable to encourage humans to slow down, contemplate, and just be, who otherwise in our frenetic inertia would never voluntarily choose to.
Food for thought.