If you spend countless hours at work, and you partially define yourself by your work, and you realise you are easily replaceable then I cannot imagine this comes without mass social malaise that manifests itself elsewhere.
When you know you're essentially babysitting the workhorse to ensure it doesn't go off the rails, I can't see job satisfaction, and the social consequences of such, increasing.
Welcome comrade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
I agree entirely. Even in an idealistic fully egalitarian post-scarcity society, to truly be happy I think most people would need to do work that they can feel a sense of accomplishment about. The problem is that work at most jobs is increasingly just toil. Any possibility to scrape some tiny flakes of satisfaction out of the toil gets removed, often for no good reason.