[mjdiloreto]

Yes, people often have a shocking misunderstanding of historical attitudes, and attribute modern sensibilities to people way too far back in time.

They obviously also haven't read Marx, who literally argued the exact opposite. He believed Capitalism caused "alienation" in the worker, preventing him from finding meaning in his work. Prior to capitalism people were highly skilled artisans, or subsistence farmers, who almost universally found meaning in their work.

So capitalism did not "give rise to a value system that teaches us to find meaning in our work", the value system was already there. Capitalism just prevented the values from being fulfilled in the workers' lives.

[andsoitis]

Maybe. The fact that these old philosophies place so much emphasis on finding meaning in work could also (and likely, in my opinion) suggest that finding value and meaning in work does not come automatically, especially since there are physical, economic, and cultural constraints on what any one of us is able to do, and so they needed call it out specifically to engender that ethos.

Putting it differently, scapegoating capitalism for preventing people from finding meaning in work seems like a shallow analysis to me. It is not like factory workers or blakcksmiths from the past who were more interested in other things (making music, say), would agree that they were fulfilled.