It’s familiar enough to be a cliché: the loyal worker who finally retires and then is flummoxed by the prospect of filling unoccupied days. For people whose sense of purpose is wrapped up in their professional identities, life without work is only a pale version of life.

Andrew Yang, currently a US Democratic presidential candidate and also the founder of job-creation nonprofit Venture for America, expresses some of the common fears about worklessness when he says: “It’s clear from the data, and common sense, and human experience, that many, many people struggle without work. We’re idle men; we volunteer less, even though we have more time. And over time, we tend to play a lot of video games, and drink more. Society generally fares very poorly without work.”

Yet it isn’t universally accepted that paid employment is key to an active life. The Japanese concept of ikigai expresses happiness in life, or the reason to get up in the morning. Among Japanese women and men surveyed in 2010, fewer than one-third equated work with their ikigai. Hobbies, relationships and unpaid work – all of these can add up to a richly meaningful life, one where “retirement” might be a foreign concept, as in Okinawa, whose residents are famously long-lived.

On the other hand, for many people in precarious employment, on low wages or with limited retirement savings, worrying about purpose outside work may be an unaffordable luxury. Many people simply can’t afford to retire early or shorten their work weeks. For those who are forced to work less without corresponding public assistance, “leisure time” is likely to be an illusion as they frantically search for ways to supplement their main income.

But the automation of work, awareness of the environmental impact of work and the growing movement for shorter work weeks mean that many of us are likely to be working less in the future. Given work helps provide meaning and structure to a week, the free time of the future could be bewildering and unhealthy. It could be funnelled into antisocial activities, including crime and drug abuse. Or it could become prosocial, being channelled into creativity, sociability and community/political participation. And there may be ways to nudge people towards the latter.