The grindslop economy is not pointed towards anything beyond itself. It is pointed simply at the worship of itself.

If you live in a meritocratic society, you have to believe that every dollar is a direct and fair contribution returned to you by the rational market. If you're all squared up and you earned every dollar there's nothing left to give.
And you have to perform that earning continuously to provide proof that you suffered, proof that the return was proportional, proof that you don't owe anything to anyone or that the market was unfair in any way. Look how much I suffer. Look how much I hurt.

Great work has always demanded sacrifice and often brutal hours and I'm not disputing this. What I'm disputing is the direction. These people, many of them friends, have more economic freedom than any class in history and they've chosen, freely, to simulate the conditions of a Chinese assembly line and call it virtue.