That's the wrong way of looking at it. Question why people are like that. Humans aren't infatuated with their work by some corporate conspiracy. Work has always defined the individual. Look at the history and origins of family names.
That's only in post agricultural societies. Look at most Pacific new Guinea tribes (where scarcity isn't much of an issue) and you see a lot more focus on social networks and leisure time.
Governments of the time forced (conspired to force?) people to pick a family name for identification and tax purposes and many simply picked their profession, location, or fathers name. Some families were multigenerational smiths for example but that had more to do with the the way people learned their trades.
> Look at the history and origins of family names.
Yeah, largely derived from occupation or location [0], at least in the West. They've lost their meaning though. Example: I'm a German-American kid named Scott; as in "from Scotland." This has always bothered me.
