"What do you do?" may have the connotation of being about work, but the literal words are actually a great conversation starter. You are falling into the same trap if you answer "nothing" because you don't do wage labor.

You don't do nothing! How dare you!!

You organize online!
You learn about socialism!
You're working your ass off to try to get healthier!
You need to rest and recover more than some folks, but that's not nothing!

If you want to change the culture, answer the literal question, not the question they think they're asking.

If they follow up with "I meant for work," then give them a face and say you can't work bc of your disability. Simple as.

People who get full time jobs stop having 80% of their free time, which is instead sold to capital. They seem boring and focused on work, because work is all they have.

lemmy has shown me the other side of this type of asshattery:

i made a career change a few months ago because i realized that my work was helping maintain all the fuckery that we're dealing with in the west and it led to me to working 2 full time jobs at the same time for a while. during that time, the liberal lemmy users accused me of being unemployed because i was posting frequently to help alleviate the stress and they REALLY didn't like what i had to say.

it made me realize that the people who are trapped into this group-think were your value as a person is defined by how you answer the "so what do you do" question is so invasive that they believe that it's not possible for you to enjoy yourself with something other than work, while you're working.

it also made me realize that they defined themselves as a human being by their work; which led to a further understanding of why job interviews are so screwed up. my autism forces me to have a different take of interviews and, up until then, i wondered by they guarded the positions w so much fervor; now i think i understand that it's how they define themselves and they want to make sure that you're one of them.

So I'm not disabled but i also hate this question because it's like what i do to make sure i don't starve tells you nothing about me as a person. So what i do is purposefully misunderstand. I'll start telling them about my hobbies. Like oh i like to write, or i garden, or something.

i feel you comrade

I remember one doctor in Poland wrote "He got his legs fucking torn off and they fucking won't regrow" when he was re-assessing disability benefit for a guy without legs.

Asking someone fresh off the surgery bed "what do you do" is crazy. Your answer isn't going to be anything good considering you had to get some work done.

This is why it's best not to go out anywhere or talk to anyone except for strictly utilitarian purposes, imo.

every time someone asks me that question i still get the juvenile urge to blurt out "your mom"

i am 34 years old

Although they did do the whole “You’ll get better soon,” thing, and imply that I can get back to work eventually

I get where they come from but at some point it's like, no. you won't "just" get better. Science doesn't have all the answers and sometimes the only thing you are left with is to accept it. It gives people false hope and repeats things they have heard a hundred times already. Sometimes it also implies that the patient hasn't done everything they could and should find that magical cure that doesn't exist. Which cure? Well you know, the one that you don't know about, your doctor doesn't know about, even the person telling you about this cure doesn't know what it is. But still, have you tried it??

Everyone thinks they know how they would act better than you in a given situation but they would never want to be put into it.