To ensure provisioning and thus survival, humans evolved to experience work as pleasurable, and it remained pleasurable for the first 98% of human history. Work provided meaning, status, and community, and was essential for human flourishing and happiness. However, since the rise of the state and civilization 5500 years ago, workers have been exploited and their work experience debased. Work came to be seen negatively as merely a means for earning income for consumption, a view perpetuated today by economic science and laissez-faire ideology. But in today’s rich countries, increased consumption does not increase happiness, and we live in the absurd condition of exploding inequality, rising insecurity, and stress while our ever-expanding consumption threatens ecological Armageddon. We need to rechart our future to recapture the positive aspects of work to which our species evolved. We can do so by guaranteeing employment at living wages with reskilling where necessary and implementing measures to democratize the workplace. These reforms, by better enabling social and self-respect through work, would reduce the pressure to seek status through consumption, lowering the risk of ecological destruction. They are politically viable because they offer an attractive alternative to the elite’s laissez-faire ideology by expanding the widely embraced values of freedom and democracy while preserving the dynamism of capitalism’s creative destruction and its institutions of private property and markets.