Unpopular opinion, but a job serves merely to survive. Most jobs are not contributing to society, the way economic hierarchies are built today, and are actively depleting our resource base and destroying our home. People have jobs because we need to survive and are for the most part coerced into mantaining the system.
That's why I sympathize with NEETs, employment fucking sucks, and if you (1) don't want to do it and (2) can avoid it, by all means, do. But you need to learn how to sustain yourself in the long term, how to avoid mind-rot usually due to idleness or screens, or a combination thereof, and so on, and this leads you to the need to work somehow. And employment is the easiest way out which is why so many people do it. It's hard to do otherwise: to be your own boss, to profit from your passion, to live moneylessly, to achieve a passive income, to trade stocks, etc.
Either of these activities, or something like doing research in academia or getting a high paying job doing something truly interesting, requires a proportional effort in study and experience, which is a function of time, over which you of course need to have food in your mouth and a roof over your head.
You talk of moving forward, but where are you heading? Does the rat race really sound like moving forward? Or do you have a vision of a life that you would like to realize? Have you thought about it? If you are dissatisfied with the standard employment model, as you should be if there's still a shred of life and humanity in your body, then you need to make a good effort, to evaluate, to plan, and to seek the actual life that you want to live lest you want to become entombed in a meaningless existence for the next ~50 years.