why use carrot when stick work

'I got a powerful need to eat'

Not at all. This person is only describing life/work in some of the post-WII developed world. Historically, this is the anomaly, not the norm.

For a large part of recorded history, the formula was that land/resource holders offered anyone the cheapest, lousiest, and worst acceptable conditions in exchange for work. The conditions of the resource holders also actually sucked, and when leveraging economies of scale, offers of relative physical and economic security (sure, you'll be kinda poor, but you don't have to travel to another town to sell grain to survive because the Lord will always buy it from you at a "fair" rate.) were typically the value add that made it worth it to consider share-cropping under nobility as opposed to simply going it alone.

I'm not sure why Reddit and Lemmy seem so hell-bent on this fantasy version of history where farming is a joy denied us by the wealthy, but its hilariously misguided. Considering where things are headed, it sounds like for many it will end up being a dangerously wrong fantasy that others can take advantage of easily, and people that post things like this will learn the lesson first hand.

How is that not true anymore? Here in the UK home ownership is increasingly a dream for the younger people so guess what - you're 100% reliant on work/pay to make rent on a home and to have stability for your family

The way they made people work for wages started at the barrel of a gun. "We take your (public) land, now you work in a factory or starve". All the rest you think are due to Capitalism, is in fact the victories of the working class struggles, which they've been trying to dismantle for the past century. If anything the system resets itself to its original form.