It is as abnormal for an American, in my experience, to consider not working, as it is to consider not breathing, or not eating.

Note that you seem to have a huge and invisible to you gender assumption :-)

Have you also thought about the possible connection between your observation and the fact that the US is a very wealthy country?

let me remind people that you can spend years and years not working.

You certainly can. There are a whole bunch of people in the US who do precisely that. Unfortunately for your argument they don't look to be ultrahip vagabonds who travel the world in between TED talks. On the contrary, they look to be poor, severely constrained in what they can do, unhealthy, stuck in bad neighborhoods with high crime rates, etc. etc.

Life is a series of choices. You can make a choice to drop out and I know people who've done that, both recently and back in the 70s. But there is a price, of course, and for some people the price is worth paying and for some it is not.

There are intermediate stages, too. For example I've met a guy who works for one month per year on an offshore platform and that gives him enough money to travel low-budget in Asia for the rest of the year. He doesn't have a house or an apartment, he is either on the platform or traveling. He stores his stuff at his mom's.

If I may make a generalization, dropping out works much better for people who are young, single, healthy, adaptable, and can quickly find a reasonable job if they need to (aka have sufficiently high IQ and some marketable skills). That's not an iron-clad rule, of course. One somewhat popular way of dropping out is to buy a cruising yacht and go off into the oceans of the world -- and that is occasionally done by full families with kids.

One other point is the uncertainty of the future. Because of it you want to both retain some flexibility and have resources to deal with whatever it throws at you. A vagabond style of life tends to be very flexible but very low on resources.