For people who are desperately looking for alternatives to the grind, it is entirely possible to live a life without a job, or with a part-time or small job, and work much less than you do now. This life will just be different and in some ways harder than your life now. Instead of trying to make more, you try to need less. Here's a rough sketch.
Scrimp and save and sacrifice for a few years at whatever the best job is you can get. Get roomates/housemates. Eat rice, beans, vegetables, and few expensive things. No unnecessary spending. However long this takes, save up around 10-15k, find a place with few building or zoning regulations (mostly rural), buy an acre or two of “shitty” land. Probably wanna stick to the Southeast if you don't want to fight harsh winters. Put up a yurt. Heat with firewood. Plant some fast growing trees for wood each year. Learn herbal medicine.
If you want to be totally jobless, start growing your own food, saving seeds, catching and purifying water, hunting and fishing, composting your own shit, and generally providing for your own needs. This is work. But it's not a job, you will be connected to the land, and maybe will get good enough at this over time to not spend near as much time “working” as a 9-5.
The other options is buy the land, get the yurt, and then work part time. Get a monthly gym membership and use their shower if your work requires a certain level of hygiene. You need very little money when there is no rent/mortgage, electric, water, internet, netflix, etc. Your reoccurring expenses would be the food you buy that you can't or don't want to grow, phone if you want to be connected to the world, and gas or car maintenance if you need it for a job. Working about half what you do now, you could probably even save some money. Maybe even afford some kind of health insurance.
Obviously this doesn't solve everything. What about health insurance? What about x, y, and z. All valid criticisms. And truly, the world shouldn't be as shitty as it is. It's unfair. Having to live like this might seem unfair to you. But if you are truly, truly desperate to get out of the soul-sucking job grind, this is an option.
TL;DR – do like Thoreau, but actually do it, don't be a lil' bitch
Edit: I definitely don't mean suck it up. We should have healthcare, good jobs, and a healthy, fair society. We do not. All I mean to say is that if your level of desperation is so high that you need to live differently to not go off into oblivion, this is an option.
Yea you do have to start with something, that's why I mentioned that first really shitty bit. Living with 5 other people in a shitty rental and scrimping for 5 solid years and dealing with that shitty job and manager for 5 years will suck ass. But, if you can save enough for a small piece of a land and a fancy tent, you can at least move somewhere and start. Or, keep doing what you are doing.