It is absolutely cultural. For example, most Historians believe that while certain times of the year were packed with grueling hard work, the average medieval farm worker had absolute hordes of time off compared to the average modern worker. When the work was done, it was done. You weren't useless if you were relaxing in the down times, even large blocks of down time, and since their culture was based around seasonality, it wasn't looked down upon.
Very different from modern corporate work culture, where you must appear to be working all the time, even if there's no work of value to do at a given time, and even if you worked day and night last month on a crunch project.
As in...serfs? They also starved to death and got conscripted into wars. They also probably had to work their lord's land before they got to their own, if there was time. Their lives were often terrible.
They also just did more. They didn't work to earn money to employ someone to work on their house; they went home and worked on their house. That might look to a simple observer as them working less, but I doubt the serf would see it that way.
No, the bad thing you mentioned was beheading on monarchs, which wasn't normal. The bad things I mentioned happened to serfs every day. That's why your comparison was meaningless.
Just because the serfs weren't working the fields in winter, doesn't mean they weren't working. They were putting in the other couple of thousand of hours of labour that were needed to keep a household running - most of which was spent on making clothes.
Life prior to the industrial revolution sucked. It took a lot of backbreaking labour to produce basic necessities of life.
Very different from modern corporate work culture, where you must appear to be working all the time, even if there's no work of value to do at a given time, and even if you worked day and night last month on a crunch project.
Very much cultural.