Terry Pratchett had it right: magic is far more boring than what we can actually do, the fascinating details that go into how it works, and the effect this has on people (and of people on it).
The details of this are not that fascinating to me; I'm frankly far more interested to study the economic and political forces that brought such technology to bear and might (or might not) save the biosphere which we are in the process of wrecking. It's not like I don't know what science and technology are good for of what they've achieved.
You know what fascinates me? Magnets. Now that you can 3d print them I'm considering designing a desktop-size particle accelerator to see what happens if you put a source of charged particles next to it. I'm also fascinated by geometry, number theory, and the topology of higher-dimensional manifolds - basic things that work unreasonably well (apart from the manifolds which I've only experienced in imagination) and are rather hard to fathom. Why, for example, does Phi keep showing up in nature, and why do books on it amount to little more than stamp collecting? What governs the distribution of prime numbers? These things are far more interesting to me than technological conveniences.
TLDR; We can model and predict things, but that does not mean we understand them.
You can say this about anything. This is science; making models and evaluating their predictive power. The models don't have to capture the underlying "truth", if it even exists.
Don't forget that I started with Much as I love science.... Trying to dazzle me with something I'm already abundantly familiar with won't work.
Also, at least you know that those super-cool animals exist. Remember that these maps were a exclusive of the enlightened classes. Peasants in feudal Portugal weren't exactly making excursions to the nearest museum. All they had, at most, were fanciful stories - if they even had that.
I'm not rejecting science. I'm rejecting the reductionist paradigm that currently dominates science and reduces it to an industrial process in a tedious competition for economic advantage, even though the elevation of other paradigms will inevitably be accompanied by a rise of pseudoscience and hucksterism.
Reductionism makes people miserable because it reduces them to mere components in an economic machine. I'm not arguing for abandoning science and technology, but I invite you to consider alternative approaches to it. Consider that recent research on how magic mushrooms and similar psychedelics show great promise in the treatment of depression...and the scientific community's response to this is to talk about the potential for manufacturing it in pill form and allowing people to experience it under professional supervision, as opposed to telling people how to identify psychedelic mushrooms and learn to enjoy them in relative safety. Science has a strong ideological component and I'm attempting to shake you into greater awareness of that.
"Magic" is what we call it when we're ignorant of how something works, and how once you know how a magic trick is done, it's not interesting anymore as a mystery.
As for working for most of your life... so what's new? Ever since we settled down, working all your life has been the norm. Being alive requires work - if someone's not doing it for you, you have to do it yourself.
"Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments and contradictory witnesses."
-Boorstin
The Discoverers
edit: add a link
Trust me, I know the great feeling when a piece of code works for the first time or some idea I have about signal processing yields an interesting result, or the excitement of getting the color of paint that I want because I learned about an interesting new pigment with excellent lightfastness properties. But nerd excitement isn't that interesting to other people. If you actually found a way to genuinely levitate, by contrast, people would go nuts just to witness it. When was the last time you saw people genuinely go nuts over something? I'm not talking about the last gushing article on the new Curiosity pictures, I mean something that people pay fat money just to have a glimpse of.
I mentioned signal processing above, which provides a useful counter-example. Synthesizers allow you to shape a signal (typically an audio signal) using various combinations of oscillators, filters, and modulators. This is tremendous fun if you're the sort of person who enjoys turning knobs and listening to bizarre sounds or watching them on an oscilloscope (thanks science). But it was also pretty expensive to make. Back in the 1980s as microprocessors became common people started using them or this purpose and it was so much cheaper to manufacture with microprocessors compared to analog circuitry, plus you could do things that were previously impossible thanks to digital precision, that digital keyboards and synthesizers took over the whole market.
After a while some people complained that the digital synthesizers were cool and all, but they just didn't sound that good for many purposes compared to the old analog ones. Proponents of digital argued with great conviction, backed up by lots of data, that digital synthesis could reproduce any imaginable analog signal and produce many other things that would be impossible to achieve using analog, and they were correct to a large extent. But as electronics manufacturing got cheaper, partly thanks to surface-mount technology and automation, and partly thanks to manufacturing in China, it became cost-effective to start making analog synthesizers and modules again. A few niche manufacturers did, then a few more, and a few more, and eventually (most of) the major synthesizer manufacturers caved and started reproducing their old analog designs and making new ones. It's not that digital was deficient, but people just prefer the sound of analog, perhaps for the same reason people often prefer to receive a hand-written letter to a printed one that elaborately reproduces the characteristics of handwritten text.