Westerners and their view of work.

Westerners have a peculiar attitude to work: they believe (or once believed) that it has a moral purpose. Outside Europe and North America, most people do not share this view. Nor did Europeans before the age of Protestantism. They did less work and believed hardly at all in its ‘ennobling’ nature.

As authorities such as Professor Marshall Sahlins, author of Stone Age Economics, have shown, even the much-maligned hunter-gatherer was a creature of leisure.
So how did our (Westerners) attitude to work come about?

The work ethic, which linked grace and salvation to good works, was the psychological engine of capitalism. But with Christianity in retreat, and its transcendental reward system largely discredited, all that remains of the work ethic is the compulsion without the high moral purpose. Hence the 'joyless striving' of work, or the ‘job satisfaction’.  Depending on how you wish to see it