“The capacity for boredom is the most underestimated of all human assets.”
Properly functioning, it’s a great b***t detector, he says.

I added a couple of quotes from this article to my Evernote Inspiration file.  

“That one thing should be so important, so valuable, that if it were the only thing you did the entire day (or what’s left of it), your day would still be a roaring success. That’s the kind of imbalance I’m talking about.”

 In thinking about that line above, and I mean really thinking about it… makes you realize the importance of doing the ONE thing that will make your whole day seem worth while.

“Similarly, it is not required of you that you dine at fine restaurants night and day – merely that you live in good health. A 50-lb bag of dog food will last you around 17 days (assuming you eat quite a bit every day); that, potable water (freely available), and a large multivitamin (around 100 days). The food would be around $20, the multivitamins amortized over several 17-day periods perhaps $3, and then an indeterminate amount for gas; let us put expenses at perhaps 30 dollars. A single soda bottle can be redeemed for ¢5, so to cover your expenses would require the redemption of 600 cans, or 36 cans a day, or 2.25 cans per waking hour. Is this an onerous task?”

The slave metaphor that you mention has been buzzing around my brain for quite a while. In reality, most of us, economically, are slaves or prisoners to our society and the organizations that constitute them. We do their dirty work to acquire food and shelter. In that sense, people like Warren Buffet are really just escape artists. Really…Warren doesn’t need social skills at all anymore. In america, even panhandling for a living is in a sense illegal since you cannot pay for housing with such an income, and you are required to pay someone else for housing in america if you do not want to get arrested for things like sleeping in public view.
In reality, doing the minimum to control your own destiny and survive, as gwern points out, really isn’t that much. Though I frequently kvetch about my poopy university, I know that all I really need to do is have enough food and water to survive. In my spare time, I publish ebooks to amazon, barnes and noble, and other platforms, and the few i have done have earned me a small but reliable pittance which i could survive on in a pinch.
Anyway, such a life would be glorious for the amount of free time available to me.