@Whatapalavaa
No children or partner but do have a mortgage and pets. I just feel trapped as daft as that sounds. Tempted to go part time for a year just to have some bloody time off 1 or 2 days a week but worried about impact on pension and overall loss of income. I feel like no matter what I do (job wise) won't change the fact that we are all here working away till some distant age we might not even reach. And then we repeat the cycle with children. It's so depressing.
I mean, at the most basic, you need to work to live.
Totally off grid and with no income, that might mean building your own shelter, growing/hunting your own food, digging a well for water, logging for fire.
If the above - providing the basics for yourself - you consider as one long slog then yes you're right, keeping yourself alive is indeed a never ending task until you die.
However if you want a more luxurious life then you need to work to earn the ability to afford the above in a nicer version.
How much luxury you exchange for your time is up to you.
And as we're lucky enough to live in the second or first worlds you might even have choices about how and where you do that.
But it's quite a step from that to 9-5, mortgage, kids, pension, which you've dropped into because "that's what everyone does". Given your limited ties I think you should challenge some of your own assumptions about what life needs to entail. What's to stop you renting out your house for a year, and doing something totally different? Life is actually very short, and too short to spend it doing things other people tell you that you should do.