But stabbing random people can be hard work. What I'm trying to get at is that, under the current conditions (at least here in the US, and maybe most of the aggressively capitalist world) we don't work for the virtue of it, for the intrinsic value of the work (or the result of the work), we work because survival & security (food, shelter, etc.) are tied to it.
I don't think there's anything wrong with work, but there is a lot wrong with coupling it with survival & security.
A few months ago, around the time that the extended unemployment benefits ended in my area, there were articles in the news about local restaurants struggling to hire. In one article (that captured the before/after of the unemployment benefits), a restaurant owner was arguing that the benefits needed to end so that people would have to go back to work, but once the benefits ended, he complained that while the number of applicants had increased, he didn't like the quality of applicants--he said they didn't want to work for him.
Now I'm going off on tangents, but I think the applicable point I'm trying to make, or rather the question I'm trying to ask you is: would you feel that your work is virtuous if it was exhausting, not in a field that had significant opportunities for mobility, and didn't pay well? What are the boundaries of work's virtue? Sometimes bad things (the opioid epidemic, for example) are the result of a lot of "hard work". Are those efforts virtuous?