"[C]ursed is the ground because of you;
in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread,
till you return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken;
for you are dust,
and to dust you shall return."
- Genesis 3:17-19
EDIT: Whether you believe this particular explanation or not, the fact that it's here is evidence that people have long felt that how unnecessarily hard work is is something that needs an explanation.
I consider myself extremely lucky, but for large swaths of my professional career I've actually really enjoyed what I was doing. There have definitely been grindy projects where I'm not working on a project that interests me on a technology stack I don't care for, but especially at the start I always looked forward to going to work in my programming job. It might as well have been the best videogame I'd ever played before. Every day was full of learning new things and I was finally getting paid a wage for something I'd been doing for fun for years. It was a small office a short drive or bike ride away with people I got along with really well. It was a short walk to a few cheap restaurants and a grocery store. I rarely had extremely tight deadlines.
Years ago I worked in the hospitality industry with a great group of people. Almost none of the days/nights felt like work. Even when it was crazy busy. The morale was excellent.
I "blame" it mostly on the two owners who also worked there. They were exemplary people and managers. Of course you need a nice group of people too, but I think a misfit wouldn't have stuck around for long.
From what I've noticed, white-collar work is mostly the cat turd dispenser feeling, retail is more an errand-boy feeling, and blue-collar work is more of a long-steady-single-turd-chew
