“The gods have taken away the good workers!”
“Women are taking the young men’s attention away!”
“This is a bad year for work.”
I dunno... if I still had a Reddit acct, I'd Ask Historians.
German sociologist Max Weber was wondering the same question about a century ago and wrote a whole book about it called "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism". The part where he talks about the Protestant notion of calling comes very close to what you described.
I read it a decade ago so the details are a bit fuzzy but I think the gist of it was it's super difficult to get into the heaven in Protestantism (it's actually pre-determined in Calvinism I think) and one needs to devote themselves to some task to avoid sinful earthly distractions. Also charitable works are kinda meaningless because only through faith you can be saved. So you have all these people who work all the time and who do not spend that much on poor people or themselves which helps with capital accumulation. Also with that mindset business becomes an end into itself that should be pursued for its own good so Weber thought this fostered the separation of personal affairs and business iirc.
Some criticisms on the idea, and especially this observation that the 'ethic' may have originated earlier than Protestantism:
> Andersen et al found that the location of monasteries of the Catholic Order of Cistercians, and specifically their density, highly correlated to this work ethic in later centuries;[37] ninety percent of these monasteries were founded before the year 1300 AD. Joseph Henrich found that this correlation extends right up to the twenty-first century.[38]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic#Criticis...