I hope things work out for your friends--stamps are a good temporary measure while you get back on your feet, and if they're good folks I'm sure that'll happen in no time. :)
As far as workaholism goes--cliched though it may be, the saying "If you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life" is something I've found to be quite true.
It's true, but unhelpful. Until they're all replaced by robots and thrown out into the cold entirely as useless, unemployed bums, someone has to clean the toilets, stack the shelves, assemble the iPods, deliver the chemical supplies from one lab to another, etc. I can't abide the notion of simply condemning some fixed portion of society to suffer because the rest of us are too stingy to pay them a living wage, nor a majority of society to suffer because a combination of a deflationary demand crisis and rising automation have rendered their labors permanently obsolete.
EDIT: Speaking for myself personally, I quite like being a grad-student and researcher, but I really felt that programming in the corporate world was... just not for me. I'm actually pretty far up the skill chain and provably (ie: I've done it before) capable of bringing in a good deal more than a subsistence wage for myself, but that still doesn't mean I love the thing that makes me the most money or gives me the most sustainable career path.
(Last Sunday I spent two hours powersnaking out a clogged commercial sewer line, so believe me that I have sympathy for shit jobs.)
I completely agree with you both that we shouldn't condemn people to work annoying jobs and that we shouldn't be corporate drones (regardless of pay).
I think that the key to fixing a lot of this is to have it easier to move around and find interesting work--if I get sick of writing code, I should be able to find a gig doing plumbing, or carpentry, or stacking, or whatnot, until I'm ready to code again.
I think that the problem we're dancing around as a society is that physical jobs are not selected-for by the market as much as they once were (due to either automation or foreign labor), and professional jobs are a few JSON blobs and sorting algorithms away from being deprecated.
We need to figure out how to deal with an educated, intelligent, and most importantly easily-bored citizenry. It's no longer enough to say "Well, everybody has to work jobs they hate, so suck it up!". If we can't solve around that, well, we're in trouble.
