Why do we work? This question arises again as AI eyes our jobs

livemint.com:

The Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren in 1930, a brief optimistic tract about the distant future at a time when the world was facing immense economic difficulties. His vision of a world of abundance and leisure, when cultivation of the art of life will be more important than an endless pursuit of the means of life, was at odds with the huge misery and unemployment that was spreading across most of the world.

“The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance," wrote Keynes, “But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes… Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well." What Keynes was optimistically predicting was a life freed from the need to work out of necessity, so that human beings could find meaning—and the true values of religion—in their lives. Chick writes that Schumacher approached the problem of a good life from an altogether different angle, especially on whether we should think of work as a means or an end.

“The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give a man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow