I don’t see people pushing much beyond 40 hours in professional environments. I work in IT and have been exposed to many industries through consulting and long term contracts. Admittedly i’m close to an urban center with fairly high cost of living but that’s where the good jobs are usually. Rural areas / closer to FPL and you start having struggles, but there’s still SNAP and Medicaid.

I also know someone who has a full time office job making ~130k TC and they also have an almost full time side gig of being a waitress who also does the schedule and hiring (so waitress manager) and she schedules herself for the busy nights, but especially friday/saturday and sports nights. Her top tipping nights can be 1k+, but this is in fairly hcol area. She put three of her kids through college doing this because she can hustle. She sure didn’t start out with this though, like most of us didn’t.

There’s shitty jobs all over, but if we’re talking anything near median wage (66k in the US) the problems you are talking about largely go away. It’s not hard to find a job to coast at though if that’s your goal… but if you’re working retail or are wait staff and making nothing on your shifts, you should find a better place to work at. Criminal records are usually the only real thing preventing this, otherwise it’s usually a preference or choice. There’s opportunity if you pursue it, but not if you disqualify yourself or limit yourself for personal reasons.