I recently saw an article about a study results which said that in Denmark large portion of population is happy with their jobs, and a lot of them would keep the exact same jobs even if winning the lottery. So, in the right culture, people can be quite happy even with the menial and (superficially) unattractive jobs.

BTW these (and similar) reports intrigue me so much that I'd consider moving to Scandivian country for a couple years just to see it first-hand.