> Given a choice, most people work as little as possible for a "living".

this is demonstrably not true. to survive in the 21st century in a developed country you could work for a few hours a day (maybe even not at all if you're in a place with a good welfare system or good homeless shelters). your quality of life would be terrible by modern standards, obviously, but you could survive. the vast majority of people work more in the modern day because we like modern comforts and we're willing to trade some time to have dishwashers and air conditioning and high speed internet.