The only reason I work is because I have to. I hate nothing more than the daily bullshit meetings and sprint reviews and all that other useless life-sucking crap. And I have it good, most people don't have the privilege of complaining from an AC'd home office while they tap away at a keyboard.
No, most people work because that's the only way they get food on the table and survive, not because of some hilariously out of touch notion of menial work being fulfilling
If that's your perspective it's easy to assume that it's the same for most people, but really reality is probably more gray. Outside of some genuinely horrible low class (paying) jobs when you talk to other people you will almost always find that there's always things they love and things they hate about their jobs, and they just sit on a spectrum. If you're really so disenfranchised from your job as to truly hate everything you do about it, what's stopping you from changing it? Like you mentioned, you have a previliegeld position you could find another far less corporate more immediate reward job that would make you happier at work. Or if you just accepted a worse fitting job for better pay, then it's not really your job's fault, you decided to sacrifice work happiness for other wealth, status or personal related happiness.
Working on your own projects is also work. There's no reason why the term work should refer exclusively to working for an employer.
Agreed and what you say is true for many, if not most workers. I think this brings up something we're all a bit reluctant to add to this conversation about UBI: the reason to do it at all.
As practiced, capitalism is just high stakes musical chairs. Everyone, rich and poor, works fervently to ensure they aren't the last ones standing with no chair. UBI asks: what if everyone always has a chair?
Its a very unsettling question, one can almost hear the record scratch when its posed. So unsettling, we start asking who deserves a chair!
And suddenly we're not talking about capitalism OR UBI at all. This is something else entirely: class. The allegedly unwashed lazy hordes versus the Ultra Clean Society of the Diamond Shower Faucets.
The primary incentive for anyone to work (as we understand the term today), is to maintain food and shelter above all else. That's it. Proponents of UBI want everyone to have food and shelter, be less of a slave. Opponents worry about whether we can afford to give everyone a chair.