But what I don't like is when people conflate a person's work situation with morality, or their value as a person.
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It seems to me to be a way in which the 'better sort' of people attempt to retain the moral highground over the unemployed.
Lots of NSFW language:


The point is that people talk about how they're a decent person - kind, loving, generous, etc. - often as an excuse for why they aren't getting something done, or aren't able to offer anything of value to society. To me, being decent, kind, and generous is sort of the baseline requirement.

And this last point is in a way the most relevant today, since it explains how our working conditions decline and our work hours increase at a time when the means of material production have been largely mechanised and human labour made redundant. This is an excellent article, btw.
Meh. It complains first that machines aren't doing all of our menial labor intensive tasks in society - and then that industries where machines have replaced man people are unemployed. But if all those laborers can offer to society is their labor, then taking that away with machines will leave them without jobs. And since they have nothing to offer besides labor, why should they live off the fruits of the work of others? We still are a rather long ways off from where all our needs can be served by machines and we can live in luxury without working.

They think that they glorify work, when what they do is in fact glorify a person's role in a productive system where individual labour is not the means of it's organisation, but a tool to be controlled. But it's not only that, these people abuse labour, so that rather than being a healthy part of a person's life and being, it becomes their defining characteristic - the sole means of determining their role and place in society. Hence when we meet a stranger in any sort of semi-formal setting, name-asking aside, our first question is generally "what do you do?".
You are looking at it wrong, I think. It's not about glorifying work, but about glorifying a contribution to society. Our job is the fundamental way we contribute to society. So it is logical that how we contribute to society is a large part of what determines our role and place in society.

There has been an overabundance of opportunity in the past, and it's drying up, rather, the opportunities no longer outstirp those vying for them.
Or perhaps we have raised successive generations of people who think that the opportunities should come to them, and not the other way around.

CR