We hear the concept of people not wanting to work any more quite often these days. The concept is not new, though it used to be focused on just slaves not wanting to work. Which it kind of still is today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania
Drapetomania was a supposed mental illness that, in 1851, American physician Samuel A. Cartwright hypothesized as the cause of enslaved Africans fleeing captivity. Slave life was so pleasant, the official view was, that only the mentally ill would want to run away. In actuality, the desire for freedom is a natural human impulse.
Cartwright specifically citing the tendency to flee the plantations that held the subjects in slavery in evidence; for why would slaves happy with their condition seek to flee? To these physicians, such people had to be sick, impervious to the natural order of things.