This is an article about one person, Keith from Silicon Valley, whose personal story the author tries to extrapolate (through a few cherry-picked quotes) and apply to society as a whole, to fit a puritanical "employment gives you purpose" narrative: a narrative which mostly serves the interests of employers. I wouldn't read too much into it.
No, your TLDR is not accurate. You're getting mislead by the common journalistic technique of adding a "human interest" angle to a story.
However, the "outer wrapper" is not the main story nor is it the TLDR.
Instead of journalists just presenting it like this:
<main story about research or science>
, they (or their editors) end up structuring articles like this:
<human-interest as color prologue>
<main story about research or science>
<human-interest as color epilogue>
Yes, the "<human-interest>" is Keith[2], but the main story is not about Keith. It's mostly a story built around Jamie Traeger-Muney[3] and her observations. There are also other observations from Timothy Judge's meta-analysis and professor Brooke Harrington.
I do concede that if your only takeaway was "Keith's story", it's possible that imprint was deliberate by the editors. (In other words, they know that psychologically, most audiences will remember a character's struggles and triumphs more than the abstract facts & figures.)
Incidentially, the articles argument alignes with what UBI proponents say: Most people won't stop working. They'll just go for more rewarding work while taking a pay-cut or demanding increased pay for shitty work.
I believe that to be true, but that's probably because I fall in the article's category; I don't think I will ever stop working. Maybe not the same thing (I do many things already that have nothing to do with coding, but for now I like coding the most). If UBI, I definitely would have started out when I was younger with very different work. If it comes now, I would not change anything.
While I partially agree with you, the author also emphasized the social status of actively working on something. That something could be founding a new venture, not necessarily being an employee, but I think the author's goal was to contrast working in some capacity vs a leisure-focused lifestyle. Full disclosure: I am a small business owner :).
I like this point of view. But for me, it's all in the meaning of "working". If you mean working = "selling a lot of your time to get a bit of freedom in your spare time", then the riches of the article are not working. To me they've just got a ticket to do what they want, in a non-slave relationship with their employer. Being able to quit if necessary, is so much more easy than having to think about your pension. That's not work anymore (at least to me, the poor soul who, eventhough he tries, has neither the luck to work on something big, neither the "commercial interest" to actually transform it into money and who's a bit jealous of those who can choose what they want to do :-), I'm biased :-) )
