i have a pretty calvinist background, so i may be poorly calibrated.
whats wrong with that? i create therefore i am. what else would you live for - consumption? comfort? to be there so no one else marks your territory? genuinely curious.
i have a pretty anti-calvinist, though thoroughly religious, background.
What's wrong with that is that Work is not God, and therefore cannot be that which justifies you (and in fact, you justify it!). Taken to extremes, work-as-that-which-i-live-for is a not very subtle idolatry, and that usually winds us up in boot-stomping-on-face-forever territory in more or less short order.
I mean this in the least greeting-card-glurgey way possible: The thing we live for isn't work, it is love.
...This circumstance constitutes in itself the most eloquent "Gospel of work", showing that the basis for determining the value of human work is not primarily the kind of work being done but the fact that the one who is doing it is a person. The sources of the dignity of work are to be sought primarily in the subjective dimension, not in the objective one.
Such a concept practically does away with the very basis of the ancient differentiation of people into classes according to the kind of work done. This does not mean that, from the objective point of view, human work cannot and must not be rated and qualified in any way. It only means that the primary basis of tbe value of work is man himself, who is its subject. This leads immediately to a very important conclusion of an ethical nature: however true it may be that man is destined for work and called to it, in the first place work is "for man" and not man "for work". Through this conclusion one rightly comes to recognize the pre-eminence of the subjective meaning of work over the objective one. Given this way of understanding things, and presupposing that different sorts of work that people do can have greater or lesser objective value, let us try nevertheless to show that each sort is judged above all by the measure of the dignity of the subject of work, that is to say the person, the individual who carries it out. On the other hand: independently of the work that every man does, and presupposing that this work constitutes a purpose-at times a very demanding one-of his activity, this purpose does not possess a definitive meaning in itself. In fact, in the final analysis it is always man who is the purpose of the work, whatever work it is that is done by man-even if the common scale of values rates it as the merest "service", as the most monotonous even the most alienating work.
What do you need to live "for" something? I haven't yet reached retirement so it's pure speculation, but I suspect having no obligations and just hanging is pretty good. Maybe not great, but to me it looks better than the world of work for pay.
BTW I looks to me that my view is in the majority - I don't have the data, but I think that the majority of people just stop working after they reach retirement - i.e. they stop paid work as soon as they can (which means that doing nothing is better than work for them).
