No, you don't. You do have to be productive, but much better to do what you love with your own projects than doing what you're told on a job. You really can't escape the dominant culture if you have a job. There's a huge lot to learn and do to make this an effective way of life, but it's crucial. Most important thing to learn is how much is enough for you, and then teach yourself to not want more. We're taught to be consumers. Jobs make you give up the time of your life in exchange for money, then you feel you have to spend the money to feel good, and since your time is pretty much gone you feel compelled to spend your money on stuff, but it doesn't make you feel good so you think that's because you don't have enough stuff yet and so you work more to get more stuff. Don't do this. Don't depend on a job.
You need community and a local currency system as a means for trading value for value. It's a way of trading your skills for the goods and services you need to have enough, but organized within a broader community, you don't have to trade directly with the person who is supplying your needs. Instead, you get currency units you can spend with someone else in the community who is offering what you want. This system gets you free from banks. That's a biggie. It also keeps the value of everybody's contributions recycling through the community and building local wealth instead of shipping it off as corporate profits. If you can partner up with enough local folks in this kind of bootstrap economy, everyone in the partnership can be freed from the peonage of jobs.
