That tracks. People only care about our birth and your death. In between, they treat you like a vending machine that owes them something.
You are punished for every moment you spend being human, every moment not devoted to the machine.
They only seem to care when it benefits them directly. Punishment is collective, enhanced by the poisoned individualism destined to segment and distrust the other people we should be seeing as friendly. The fact is, anything other than life or death is essentially lies and deceiving, this is evident with the “protect the kids” and the like - using a particular minority as tools of discrimination.
Like you said, from the moment of birth, we are destined to keep the bone crushing machine running. Manipulated and exploited is one way to describe this