I feel like this phrase, which was on signs at the entrance to German concentration camps, bears a direct correlation to modern society.
People are conditioned to believe that if they just labor a little bit harder, then they'll be happy, or free, or have their basic needs met. It's an incredibly abusive and sick condition, from the youngest age people are compelled to follow a machine-like schedule in horribly oppressive buildings, doing things they don't want to do for the sake of external rewards.
Here are a few good quotes from Sylvia Federici's (fantastic and highly recommended) book 'Caliban and the Witch':
“The situation was radically different in the period of primitive accumulation when the emerging bourgeoisie discovered that the “liberation of labor-power” — that is, the expropriation of the peasantry from the common lands — was not sufficient to force the dispossessed proletarians to accept wage-labor. Unlike Milton's Adam, who, upon being expelled from the Garden of Eden, set forth cheerfully for a life dedicated to work,5 the expropriated peasants and artisans did not peacefully agree to work for a wage. More often they became beggars, vagabonds or criminals. A long process would be required to produce a disciplined work-force. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the hatred for wage-labor was so intense that many proletarians preferred to risk the gallows, rather than submit to the new conditions of work (Hill 1975:219—39).”
“The course of scientific rationalization was intimately connected to the attempt by the state to impose its control over an unwilling workforce. This attempt was even more important, as a determinant of new attitudes towards the body, than the development of technology. … Certainly, the clock and the automated devices that so much intrigued Descartes and his contemporaries (e.g. hydraulically moved statues), provided models for the new science, and for the speculations of Mechanical Philosophy on the movements of the body. It is also true that starting from the 17th century, anatomical analogies were drawn from the workshops of the manufacturers: the arms were viewed as levers, the heart as a pump, the lungs as bellows, the eyes as lenses, the fist as a hammer … But these mechanical metaphors reflect not the influence of technology per se, but the fact the machine was becoming the model of social behavior.”