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First time in the third world? Honestly, this is kind of universal in poor countries, at least in the many I’ve visited. There has been online-right discourse on this, some of it unnecessarily mean.
The answer to your question is that much of the world isn’t really capitalist. In fact, pretty much everywhere outside of the highly atomised anglosphere, a few tax havens and some maritime trading states like Hong Kong and Singapore aren’t really capitalist. Even they have welfare, subsidies and so on, but most people aren’t hardline libertarians about this. From there there’s a spectrum to the other capitalist-but-with-substantial-additional-characteristics systems like those of much of continental Europe, rich East Asia and Latin America, then into fully hybrid systems, and then onto places like India and Egypt and big chunks of SEA and then to much of sub-Saharan Africa where a thin layer of capitalism is draped over a far more primordial system of economic relations that becomes stronger the further you go from major cities.
In the rest of the world outside those countries that trace direct ethnocultural lineage to England, capitalism exists to various extents alongside other economic systems. It isn’t that they don’t have private property, markets or trade, it’s just that the rules of capitalism, of supply and demand, of creative destruction, of shareholder value, of any real notion of creative efficiency don’t really govern the economic relationship (between labour and the ‘means of production’, if you want to be Marxist about it) for most people.
The formal private sector in full-time roles might employ somewhere between 5% and 25% of the workforce, usually the lower end of that range - Sub-Saharan Africa averages around 10%. There are some public sector sinecures usually concentrated in certain regions, and state jobs work very different to how they work in the first world (most don’t ‘really’ exist as actual jobs, to start) that vary significantly by country and region.
But most of the population work informally, if at all. The lucky ones own economically valuable assets like farmland or a taxi or machinery or a small business. The expectation is that family has a duty to employ family, which is why a small store might have 5 ‘employees’ (while in the West it would have 1) who are likely themselves paid informally and when it’s viable for the business.
Unlike in the rich world, the chance of long term stable employment and therefore of making enough money to retire comfortably or to make a living off capital (even in retirement) is pretty much zero outside of a small, largely endogamous middle class in a handful of major cities, so there isn’t really the same work ethic. If you hustle hard your stuff is going to get stolen, you won’t have as much time with friends and family, and if you make anything of yourself you’re going to have to share it with the whole community anyway, so the incentives are minimal to even try.
This is what euphemisms like “the pace of life is just slower” actually mean. Inside Europe, you see the same thing between, say, the Netherlands and Greece. There are a tiny number of countries with a deep-level culture of working hard and working constantly (idle hands etc), mostly in Northwestern Europe and settler colonies, to some extent maybe in Japan, and then the Chinese have their own millennia-old complex relationship to labor, but that’s kind of it.
I've been to places like this though don't have anything but anecdotes. My guess is "the pace of life is slower" means markets here are broken, so you can't buy much, so there's really no point in working much. They didn't choose the simple life out enlightened non-materialism but because there's no way to choose anything else.
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For an exploration of the ‘if you make anything you have to share anyways so why bother’ from the inside of the culture, pick up The Black Tax- it’s South African so it’s in English and framed as a self help book to help black earners keep more of their money to spend on themselves.
Theo Dalrymple wrote about it when discussing practicing medicine in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe before, during and after the move to majority rule there, too.
Highly recommend "Life at the Bottom" by him if you haven't read it. A bit dated now but important for people who have mostly theoretical exposure to the underclass.
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