It goes even farther back than that, I mean the stoics were preaching things like live each day like it's your last, and there are proverbs from ancient China like "being the rat in the granary than the rat in the toilet". At the same time there are plenty of counter examples and people teaching the opposite, like Diogenes.

I think it's useless trying to find councel regarding these things, people will just say what they believe is right. It's mostly just seeking external validation.

The end state should just be a lack of judgement -- right now we are too preoccupied with minmaxing so called productivity which is mostly an illusion most times. Much of this comes from a self imposed sense of guilt, in that doing nothing becomes like eating junk food. And this sense of guilt is in turn cultivated by the environment at large. Try telling people you're in between jobs or taking a sabbatical, they'll just assign you to the "loser" or "unemployed" class automatically.