The problem isn't work per se, it's our attitudes toward work and the projects that we choose to work on.
"Do what makes you happy" is a cliche that we all accept, but if you think about it, it's actually a very self-centered and egoistic way of deciding what to do. If we used different heuristics, like do what's best for your family/community/world, it might lead to very different answers than doing what makes you happy. It might even involve quite a bit more of what we call "work". Not work for the purposes of financial gain or social status, but work that improves the world for current and future generations.
That said, it's clear that our culture doesn't optimize for rewarding the kinds of work that actually make the world better. That's something we should try to correct for, rather than abandoning work as a value altogether.
That might be true in your case. What makes someone else happy might be to engage in rent-seeking behavior to profit as much personally off of other people as possible. Even if maximizing personal happiness works as an ethical norm for some people, that doesn't mean that it's the best advice to give universally.
"Do what makes you happy" is a cliche that we all accept, but if you think about it, it's actually a very self-centered and egoistic way of deciding what to do. If we used different heuristics, like do what's best for your family/community/world, it might lead to very different answers than doing what makes you happy. It might even involve quite a bit more of what we call "work". Not work for the purposes of financial gain or social status, but work that improves the world for current and future generations.
That said, it's clear that our culture doesn't optimize for rewarding the kinds of work that actually make the world better. That's something we should try to correct for, rather than abandoning work as a value altogether.