For example saying that people in Spain or Portugal love living the good live and not working is a generalization.
Today, when most work is actually done by machines and not humans, you could actually be way more productive not burning yourself out than burning.
In Germany they have more machines, because they have more capital and because they forced the Southern countries to destroy its industries. That happened with Spain and specially Italy for entering the EU. 32-36% of the Spanish economy was industry before joining the UE, now it is 12% and going down.
For example, In Spain they put quotas(limits) in the milk that every milk producer could generate in the north of Spain, that has a wet climate, like France, UK, or Germany. Those countries of course had not quotas.
This way European companies(specially French companies) could enter the Spanish market and have bigger markets, but the Spanish companies could not compete because they had to reduce production.
With bigger markets, they had bigger mass scale productions, more efficiency and could put prices that put out of the market Spanish companies.
On the other hand, the South of Spain was benefited as it produces things that Europe do not.
They also flooded the real state market with easy money coming from European banks that will lend outrageous amount of money to anybody with a pulse.
That made year to year profits of 20-30% in real state in the bubble, further increasing the desinvestment in industry, that could only give moderate 3-4%.
Of course lending to people that could not pay back was a bad idea, and when the bubble burst lots of banks from Germany, UK, or France should have gone down.
But of course the governments of those countries forced the Spanish government to buy the bad debt, making the Spanish Government bankrupt itself.
Reality is complex, but we love simple arguments.