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Vladimir_M comments on On the unpopularity of cryonics: life sucks, but at least then you die - Less Wrong
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But that's not the case in the modern developed world. If you are really indifferent to status, you can easily get enough food, housing, and medical care to survive by sheer freeloading. This is true even in the U.S., let alone in more extensive welfare states.
Of course, completely forsaking status would mean all sorts of unpleasantness for a typical person, but this is only because we hate to admit how much our lives revolve around zero-sum status competitions after all.
Don't forget about the status obtained from having power over others. That's one part of the human nature that's always dangerous to ignore. (The old European nobility was certainly not indifferent to it, and not just towards the peasants.)
Also, there would always be losers in these post-work status games who could improve their status by engaging in some sort of paid work and saving up to trade for the coveted status markers. These tendencies would have to be forcibly suppressed to prevent a market economy with paid labor from reemerging. It's roughly analogous to the present sexual customs and prostitution. Men are supposed to find sexual partners by excelling in various informal, non-monetary status-bearing personal attributes, but things being zero-sum, many losers in this game find it an attractive option to earn money and pay for sex instead, whether through out-and-out prostitution or various less explicit arrangements.
I'm not sure this is true; I know little about welfare politics, but I was under the impression there was a major shift over the last ten years toward limiting the amount of welfare benefits available to people who are "abusing the system" by not looking for work.
One could probably remain alive for long periods just by begging and being homeless, but this raises the question of what, exactly, is a "life worth living", such that we could rest content that people were working because they enjoy status competitions and not because they can't get a life worth living without doing so.
This is probably way too subjective to have an answer, but one thing that "sounds right" to me is that the state of nature provides a baseline. Back during hunter-gatherer times we had food, companionship, freedom, et cetera without working too hard for them (the average hunter-gatherer only hunted-gathered a few hours a day). Civilization made that kind of lifestyle impossible by killing all the megafauna and paving over their old habitat, but my totally subjective meaningless too-late-at-night-to-think-straight opinion is that we can't say that people can opt-out of society and still have a "life worth living" unless they have it about as good as the hunter-gatherers they would be if society hadn't come around and taken away that option.
The average unemployed person in a developed country has a lot of things better than hunter-gatherers, but just the psychological factors are so much worse that it's no contest.
The specific situation in the U.S. or any other individual country doesn't really matter for my point. Even if I'm wrong about how easy freeloading is in the U.S., it's enough that we can point to some countries whose welfare systems are (or even just were at some point) generous enough to enable easy freeloading.
Ironically, in my opinion, in places where there exists a large underclass living off the welfare state, it is precisely their reversal to the forager lifestyle that the mainstream society sees as rampant social pathology and terrible deprivation of the benefits of civilized life. I think you're committing the common error of idealizing the foragers. You imagine them as if you and a bunch of other highly intelligent and civilized people had the opportunity to live well with minimal work. In reality, however, the living examples of the forager lifestyle correctly strike us as frightfully chaotic, violent, and intellectually dead.
(Of course, it's easy to idealize foragers from remote corners of the world or the distant prehistory. One is likely to develop a much more accurate picture about those who live close enough that one has to beware not to cross their path.)
You are not wrong about "freeloading," though that term is probably (unnecessarily pejorative). The Developed world is so obscenely wasteful that it is not necessary to beg. You can get all the food you want, much of it very nice - often much nicer than you could afford to buy by simply going out and picking it up. Of course, you don't get to pick and choose exactly what you want when you want it.
Clothing, with the exception of jeans, is all freely available. The same is true of appliances, bedding and consumer electronics of many kinds. The one commodity that is is very, very difficult to get at no cost is lodging. You can get books, MP3 players, CDs, printers, scanners, and often gourmet meals, but lodging is tough. The problem with housing and why it is qualitatively different that the other things I've cited is that while it is technically illegal to dustbin dive, in practice it is easy to do and extremely low risk. It is incredibly easy in the UK, if you get a dustbin key (easy to do).
However, the authorities take a very dim view of vagrancy, and they will usually ticket or arrest the person who has either "failure to account," or is clearly living in a vehicle or on the street. This is less true in the UK than the US. However, get caught on the street as a vagrant AND as a foreigner in the UK (or in the US, or in any Developed country) and you are in a world of hurt - typically you will be deported with prejudice and be unable to renter the country either "indefinitely," or for some fixed period of time.
If you can swing lodging, then the world is your oyster (for now). I travel with very little and within 2 weeks of settling on a spot in large city, I have cookware, flatware, clothing, a CD player, a large collection of classical CDs, and just about anything else I want to go looking for. There is an art to it, but the waste is so profligate that it is not hard to master, and absolutely no begging is required (except for lodging ;-))