That doesn't always work. Maybe some people can lie to themselves that the 8+ hours they spend grinding away in some fluorescent hellhole for 40 years is fine if they can just avoid thinking about that 1/3 of their precious short time on Earth, but that doesn't work for everyone. Compartmentalizing your misery is not healthy, and it DOES eventually catch up to you. Trust me.
The job in the story is a stand-in for "an abusive job". The point isn't to ask the reader whether or not they'd take it, the point is that it is abusive and pointless. Like, it's not posing the question "would you take this job?" It's asking you to consider the life of someone whose job is, a priori, abusive and meaningless.
I don't blame too many privileged tech workers who feel their soul being slowly eroded away, because working in software is one of the only decent ways to have any economic security at all anymore. Admittedly, Silicon Valley is responsible for some of this insecurity, but still.
Housing is expensive. Food is expensive. Childcare is expensive. Health insurance is expensive (even the "good" insurance, where a PPO will still gleefully deny your claims).
So you can either be well-off and miserable, but probably not destitute, or you can work at a gas station, and enjoy 30-40 years of precarity before you die of a preventable illness.
You can absolutely be depressed because of your circumstances. Put a gorilla in a small room with nothing to do for weeks and watch it become depressed. We've built a society that values all the wrong things, and then overworks people until they break. Therapy is great, but you can't always fix broke things by gaslighting yourself into thinking they aren't really broken.