The Protestant work ethic once contained many good things like a sense of duty, efficiency, self-discipline and so on. Emancipation of others, and helping others out of poverty was always built into that!
But under late stage capitalism it becomes disfigured and twisted.
That guilt is used against us. We make "work" into something that must be miserable by definition. And some of us even revel in that self-flagellation. We stop distinguishing between laborious chores and work as art and living. "Money and survival" eclipse all else. The abject penury of that mind-set is a sort of work in itself.
It need not be. Ten thousand years of artisan labour, craftsmanship, labours of love building cathedrals and monuments, cooking delicious meals... Half of all the work done in the world is childcare and caring for the old.
It's the power relations of capitalism that make work shitty, and we all know it. There's nothing "fundamental" about it. We are at a very unique and hopefully short moment in history where modern employers will go out of their way to fit suffering, humiliation and self-loathing into the job-description, maybe in order to feel justified for what they pay - often cynically hiding behind false notions of efficiency and necessity, security or whatever.
Some of the most miserable and fucked-up people I've ever met work in banking, advertising. and other places of "privilege".