A job is a trade. You give your time and capability to someone else's project. They give you a fixed amount of money in return. The terms of the trade are set by whoever has the most power in the negotiation — which is almost never you.
This is not an argument against work. Work is the mechanism through which value is created and through which you develop the capability to create more of it. The argument is against the specific structure of employment — the arrangement where someone else captures most of the value your work creates.
The mathematics of employment are simple and rarely examined. You create a certain amount of value through your work. A fraction of that value is returned to you as salary. The rest accrues to the employer. The fraction returned to you is determined by how much leverage you have in the negotiation and how easily you can be replaced. In most employment relationships, the answer to both is: not much and pretty easily.
The alternative is to build something. To create a structure where you capture a larger fraction of the value you create — potentially all of it, plus the value created by others who work within your structure. This is harder. It involves risk, uncertainty and the possibility of failure. It also involves the possibility of creating something that generates value for years or decades beyond the hours you actively spend on it.
The profound insight is not that jobs are bad — it is that a job is a starting point, not a destination. The people who break out of the rat race are not the ones who found the best job. They are the ones who used employment to develop capability, saved enough to give themselves a runway and then built something of their own. Your duty to yourself is to build. Start today, even if you are still employed.