Friendship and community are harder work than your job, because no one makes you do it. It pays off in peculiar ways many years later, if ever at all. It’s senseless effort, but only figuratively. The returns I get are incalculable, but only literally.
See also: the imago dei.
What you’re describing is not “Christian values” but the famed “Protestant work ethic,” a product of puritan immigrants fleeing European discrimination. That ethic is Christian in source but when divorced from the knowledge that God makes you worthy—not your productivity— you begin the long slide into hustle culture, greed, and other current miseries.
Ironically, this is the literal opposite of Christianity. Christianity in a nutshell is "Jesus saves people because we are incapable of saving ourselves."
So, yeah. "Must earn their worth" may sound "Christian", but it's not Christianity.
Blasphemer! That's the primary tenet of the "Prosperity Gospel"[0], the primary form of Christianity in the US.
For shame! You will burn in hell for that. Unless you donate $100,000.00 to Creflo Dollar[1] right now!
Jesus saves us from the final end destruction, and helps us who believe on him through our daily lives. Some people get along fine without religion. What happens to them when the final destruction (from God, not man) gets here depends on whether these people continue to do it all on their own and choose to not believe; or whether they choose to let him in and believe. In either case, Jesus is about the final end of humans which will be done by God and is outside our control, even outside Jesus' control; that is what Christianity is about.
Its possible that some sub groups of people learned that work from home gave them more meaning than the rat race. For it to be true across the board? That creates a huge burden of proof.
This is true, until they have a medical emergency that breaks them because they can't afford it, or the furnace in their house breaks, or they are reno-evicted by their landlord, or their car breaks down or whatever
You're broadly right that money doesn't exactly buy happiness, but it does prevent or mitigate a lot of unhappiness