Fetishizing hard work is a purely American phenomenon. Like many other parts of American culture, it has to do with the country's Puritan roots.
Back in England, the Puritans were entirely city people. Even those who lived on the countryside were not farmers. So when they came to America, they had to work extra hard to learn farming and adopt that lifestyle, which was made even more difficult by the fact that the soil in the Massachusetts area was hard, rocky and not very fertile.
What is interesting however was that they refused to pick up the farming habits, tools and techniques developed by the settlers who had arrived earlier. Puritans would often complain about the inexplicable justice of "heathen" Americans who were seemingly lazy and were laying around all day, doing maybe a little bit of work here and a little bit there, while still managing to bring in bountiful harvests. Meanwhile, Puritans were breaking their backs from sunrise to sunset working the land and had little to show for it. This behavior came to be known as the "Puritan work-ethic" but in reality it had nothing to do with ethic and everything to do with necessity combined with pure ignorance (i.e. refusing to use more efficient farming techniques).
The history is actually very interesting and has many parallels to your story. You, too, were using superior techniques (i.e. automation) while your coworkers, out of ignorance, shunned it and instead stubbornly continued to do their work manually.
(Another thing that is fascinating was that Puritans were responsible for the banning of many celebrations and holidays, presumably because they themselves had no time to celebrate or take days off from their inefficient work.)
Actually I think that's entirely backwards. The celebration (calling it "fetishization" is a little loaded for my tastes) of leisure time across a whole workforce is a very recent phenomenon, and it's limited almost exclusively to post-war western Europe. Everyone else is still cheering for elbow grease.
Hard labor has been the norm in our society since before it was a society. For thousands of years, people who worked harder got more done and were less likely to, y'know, starve.
A counterpoint: "Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: 'Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do.' Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment."
-Bertran Russel in 1932
Are you sure about it? I think that before the industrialization people had only very vague concepts of work efficiency. Before the pocket watch was introduced, people could have had only a very vague idea of the time, especially when not in hearing-range of the church bells. Units produced per worker per minute? Not happening on a farm.
You literally worked for the MAN, a servant, and lived much more in a collective as we could stomach today. Individually going out and "making it"? Not realistic.
Things were slow. Harvest would happen in a few months, your market was local and expanding a business unrealistic in many cases. Travel was super slow and dangerous. Society was restricted in many ways. Wars, fires, famines could happen anytime and destroy everything you had.
Work was usually physically hard, and food might be scarce, and you better not get ill or injured, right? Are you sure putting in 150% would be wise under these circumstances?
But I'm curious if you've some other aspects I am missing, particularly anything authentic from literature describing the ambitious, hard working people you have in mind.
Fetishizing hard work is a purely American phenomenon
True, if by "American" you mean "American, German, Swiss, Austrian, Swedish, Japanese, Victorian British, and Protestant". (I'm sure I left out a few, actually).
I do have some experience with Germans, and I don't think so. Germans are pros. They expect you to be professionals, the expect you to be prepared, on time, and do a good work, and they expect you not to waste anyone's time.
This, in the end, makes for a every different business culture than I remember from US -- the meetings are as short as possible. The managers actually listen to their engineers, because their expertise is what they are paying them for, and I have yet to meet a German Pointy Haired Boss, while experience both mine and of my friends with US or US-run corporations is that more than half managers are PHBes. They also don't care what you wear, don't care what you do after work, and the don't want unnecessarily long hours. They are efficient an serious about what they do, but they don't worship work the way USians and Japanese do, for example.
(I don't have experience with working with other cultures. Also, I'm not German.)
EDIT: But in no way would Germans require you to do more hours just for the sake of more hours. You owe the company you work for your best, professional effort. But you owe them 40 hours, not more.
Nothing you said contradicts the previous poster though. Germans do value hard work. You are inexplicably interpreting "hard work" to mean "long hours". Hard work is working hard, it is entirely orthogonal to how long you spend working.
It's not really about nationality, it's about the company you run or work for. Sure some nationalities generally stick to shorter hours, but the reaction you get from coworkers or the boss if you keep a strict 8 - 16 day is company culture.
I work for a small company, where the owner work long hour, 12 - 16 hours a day. My desire to stay at home in my hammock in the garden doesn't really fit their view of working. However if I did my jobs a developer to perfection, then they wouldn't know the different between me sleeping in the hammock or sitting behind the desk. It can be hard to explain, because it quickly become "time we could be spending on other projects".
In my experience nationality (or, to put it another way, the culture that you share with the people in your region) does matter. I'm certainly not saying that a nation's work ethic is shared by every single citizen - generalizations naturally don't apply to everyone. I'm also not saying that all companies in a country behave the same - there are going to be variations. But overall, the way you look at work varies greatly from country to country.
Puritans believe in Calvinist predestination. In a nutshell, God has known you for eternity. God knows what's going to happen and what you're going to do. God decided whether you will be saved or not before you were born. Your salvation/damnation happens through God's grace, not through your good works.
This presents a dilemma: Why be a good, hard-working citizen if you can't affect the final outcome? The answer is they came up with is clever and I'm going to greatly oversimplify it.
Basically, the Puritans believed that there are clues as to whether you are going to be saved. If you look at a guy and he's a hardworking, serious fellow, he's probably going to be saved. If the guy is lazy and frivolous he's probably damned.
Thus your immortal soul depends on working as hard as possible even though it's God's grace that saves you and not your works.
To add a bit to this, the Puritans believed that earthly success was a sign of one being predestined to eternal salvation. So they worked hard for success.
Little known fact: The Puritans invented the concept of "p-value", and like every one else doing statistics since, they misinterpreted its meaning, assuming that "P implies Q with probability 95%" means that "Q implies P with probability 95%"
That is a rough approximation of Max Weber's theory from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which is an amazing and surprisingly readable little book.
I was under the assumption that the entire idea of the "protestant work ethic" had it's roots in calvanism and predestination not farming. The idea was that because everything was already predetermined by God, working hard and making lots of money was your just reward and signaled to others you were righteous.
Besides its still better to teach your kids to work hard than the 'work life balance' thing. From your kids perspective, the 'work life balance' thing is going to be synonymous with laziness.
And in nearly all cases the problem is not with working hard, its working hard in the right direction.
Back in England, the Puritans were entirely city people. Even those who lived on the countryside were not farmers. So when they came to America, they had to work extra hard to learn farming and adopt that lifestyle, which was made even more difficult by the fact that the soil in the Massachusetts area was hard, rocky and not very fertile.
What is interesting however was that they refused to pick up the farming habits, tools and techniques developed by the settlers who had arrived earlier. Puritans would often complain about the inexplicable justice of "heathen" Americans who were seemingly lazy and were laying around all day, doing maybe a little bit of work here and a little bit there, while still managing to bring in bountiful harvests. Meanwhile, Puritans were breaking their backs from sunrise to sunset working the land and had little to show for it. This behavior came to be known as the "Puritan work-ethic" but in reality it had nothing to do with ethic and everything to do with necessity combined with pure ignorance (i.e. refusing to use more efficient farming techniques).
The history is actually very interesting and has many parallels to your story. You, too, were using superior techniques (i.e. automation) while your coworkers, out of ignorance, shunned it and instead stubbornly continued to do their work manually.
(Another thing that is fascinating was that Puritans were responsible for the banning of many celebrations and holidays, presumably because they themselves had no time to celebrate or take days off from their inefficient work.)