We can even relax this to: let's stop at whatever amount of work that is necessary and not more.
A good start would be to stop producing so much junk.
(edit: downvoters: interested in what you think, please develop. I think we produce a big amount of useless stuff, and that keeps many human beings pointlessly busy - what's the positive here?)
Signaling to attract a desired mate. Or whatever other reason (at least some) humans are attracted to power.
What amount of work is necessary? Apartment life without personal car? Townhouses with a 1 car garage? Detached single family homes with 2 car driveway with 2 Toyotas? Or is it 1 Toyota and 1 Lexus? A flight to a tropical destination once ever 3 years? Or every year?
I didn't mean the amount of work an individual needs to do to get enough money to fund their life or for something else, I meant the amount of necessary work the human population needs to do, collectively.
As a first step, we could as the human species decide that such or such thing is not useful, or even harmful, and stop producing it. Or reduce production of the stuff we are producing in too big quantities. That would reduce the amount of work we do.
Not saying it's easy, it might require huge changes, but seen from outside we probably look very silly.
There's a fast food place I discovered recently, they serve your meal in a disposable box. That could be changed to use reusable plates instead. Okay, that can be hard because then the place needs to handle washing the dishes.
They also give disposable glasses if one asks. I can avoid this by bringing my own bottle, in my country nobody would see an issue with this, tap water is free in restaurants by law. If many people do this, that less of these glasses to produce in the first place.
And above all they also unconditionally give you both disposable chopsticks and a disposable fork without asking. I would guess almost half of this stuff is produced to be immediately thrown without even being used a single time. Those could be made reusable too, but there's even a first step that would also cost less time to the restaurant, so double win: let people take what they need. quadruple win, because that's also less waste to handle, and so less effort to take care of the Earth when we inevitably need to do it.
And the disposable cutlery, or wrapping (for groceries, for instance), is only the tip of the iceberg. Think also useless/harmful software, software that is made over and over because nothing is open source and shared. Think cheaply made and/or unrepairable stuff that breaks too early and you need to replace entirely. And again, all the work needed to handle this waste.
There are a lot of low hanging fruits. But how we as a species are organized right now does not handle this very well, does not incentivize it, actually doesn't even care that much and actually incentivizes the contrary and externalizes waste and pollution, mostly.
So yes, that's a pitch for degrowth, that may sound extreme to some, but it should just go without saying. And I'm not even touching the idea that we could (and probably should) lower our comfort, that's free degrowth without hurting comfort!
What I'm proposing here actually improves our comfort, because we have less work to do so more free time, more time with our loved ones, more time doing what you decide to do! It can even be what you do for work, why not, if you like doing this. And maybe more time for boredom and deep thinking, which need more of.
All that junk is making us work more. It's so meaningless to spend so much cumulative time producing pointless things. What a giant waste of time.
