This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What’s the point of working if you can live through getting “benefits”?”

You’re asking the wrong question.

Instead, you should ask, “What is the point of living like a lazy slug who accomplishes nothing and does nothing to make themselves feel good about themselves or their lives?”

That’s what you’re implying with your question.

You imply a false dichotomy between living one’s life based on laziness rather than doing what motivates them or submitting themselves to an abusively dehumanizing existence as a disposable cog to make someone else rich while struggling with one’s self-respect.

Life isn’t a choice between working and not working. It’s a choice between employment as a wage slave or generating an income for oneself based on doing what matters to them and which motivates them to be excited about their lives.

Employment used to be a motivator when the income generated enough to go well beyond meeting basic needs and into enough disposable income to invest in one’s future.

That’s no longer the case.

Employment today is the equivalent of a lifetime of dog-paddling in an ocean until one gets too tired and drowns.

That’s not a life. That’s a lifetime prison sentence.

What’s the point of struggling in poverty until you die to make someone else wealthy when you can be much happier and less stressed while doing what you love?

Bonus Question:
Should there be a universal basic income to address economic inequality?

UBI doesn’t address the issue of economic inequity, and it isn’t intended to.

UBI provides economic stability and gives people room to make the best choices for themselves without having a desperate need to survive leveraged against them.

UBI frees people from the pressures of meeting basic survival needs enough to escape oppressive working conditions. The consequences of businesses losing the leverage of economic desperation to create downward pressure on wages can more easily permit upward pressure on wages.

This change in a negotiating dynamic contributes to a reduction in economic disparity, but it doesn’t address it head-on.