Ok, so do it. Get some like-minded people who want to live free of industrial society and go hunter-gather in a national park, or the deep Amazon rainforest or some other out of the way place.
Or we could restructure society a little bit so we don't have to work as much, freeing up time for us to explore our ideas and thus improving the economy in the long run. Authors like this take things to their logical extreme as a form of rhetoric when what they really want is to get you to think about the necessity of work on a deeper level than what you've read in your economics 101 textbook.
