There will always be people without ambition, without dreams, without a wish to do more, be more. In our current society these are precisely the under-employed people that you describe. Everyone with a bit of self-motivation is off at the office earning a living.
Have you ever tried taking a really long vacation? Really long as in 6 months or more? Once you get to the end of the first few months, you start getting bored. You start looking for things to do, and as you don't have loads of money to spend (after all you're not working) you're looking for something not too expensive.
One of the great things about today's society is that doing something creative is actually quite cheap - you could take up patchwork quilting for the price of a $100 sewing machine and some material. You could take up drawing for the price of some paper and paints, or an iPad. Your could take up music for about $100 to by a cheap instrument and some sheet music. Or cooking (accepting that you're already going to have to spend money for food to live, cooking is a very cheap hobby), or writing a book, or making a video game, or pretty much every single Y-Combinator start-up ever... because you know what, pg's view that you don't need a lot of money for a start-up these days is also true for doing things that aren't aimed at making money.
Over the last 10 years of my career, I've built some really cool technology that I have been quite proud of. I have done this as a salaried employee working for various companies. Not one of the products on which I have worked on for those 10 years has made it to market. I've learned a lot personally, and it's quite agreeable work, but I don't get as much out of it as I would if I was working on a product of my own choosing. Yet society somehow finds a way to pay me a 6-figure salary for doing effectively nothing. If I'm not going to do anything useful for society, it would be far more rational to work on nothing useful that at least interests me, no?
Have you ever tried taking a really long vacation? Really long as in 6 months or more? Once you get to the end of the first few months, you start getting bored. You start looking for things to do, and as you don't have loads of money to spend (after all you're not working) you're looking for something not too expensive.
One of the great things about today's society is that doing something creative is actually quite cheap - you could take up patchwork quilting for the price of a $100 sewing machine and some material. You could take up drawing for the price of some paper and paints, or an iPad. Your could take up music for about $100 to by a cheap instrument and some sheet music. Or cooking (accepting that you're already going to have to spend money for food to live, cooking is a very cheap hobby), or writing a book, or making a video game, or pretty much every single Y-Combinator start-up ever... because you know what, pg's view that you don't need a lot of money for a start-up these days is also true for doing things that aren't aimed at making money.
Over the last 10 years of my career, I've built some really cool technology that I have been quite proud of. I have done this as a salaried employee working for various companies. Not one of the products on which I have worked on for those 10 years has made it to market. I've learned a lot personally, and it's quite agreeable work, but I don't get as much out of it as I would if I was working on a product of my own choosing. Yet society somehow finds a way to pay me a 6-figure salary for doing effectively nothing. If I'm not going to do anything useful for society, it would be far more rational to work on nothing useful that at least interests me, no?