...imho this is a small-scale view of the fact that we live in a bullshit society: our social systems can't properly handle "people with too much free time who don't know themselves what to do with that free time". For a variety of reason: from increased social unrest and fact that people would actually have time to care about who/how governs, to the productivity lowering effect of having the productivity of the people that actually choose (and are able to!) to be productive being lowered by being surrounded by slackers etc..

Our current social order needs "rituals" to stabilize people's behaviors, and you can't just let people pick any random set of rituals from the space of posibilities and expect the consequences not to be horrible! You might end up with warring clans that choose to wage war in lack of a better occupation, or with weird cults that bounce between self-destructive and other-destructive behaviors. If you've had the chance to see the darker sides of human nature it's not hard to imagine swarms of people with nothing to do forming sado-massochistic pain-pleasure cults that wage wars amongst themselves "for fun" or to kidnap eachother's children to torture during massive orgies or whatever... People's minds cane easily become fertile grounds for very dark tendencies.

"Work rituals" are at least stable, stabilizing, and not-very-harmful.