Yeah, the &quot;all jobs are drudge work&quot; theory does not pass muster with me, either.  Most jobs are the result of economic specialization.  When everyone does the one thing that they are best at, and trade the fruits of their efforts, the whole economy is more productive.<p>The traditional example is a carpenter and electrician building houses.  Now, the electrician is a genius, and he can actually frame a house faster than the carpenter.  This is how long it takes them for each task, and wiring has to occur after the framing is completely done:<p><pre><code>  Task       |Framing|Wiring|
  -----------+-------+------+
  Electrician|   44h |  24h |
  Carpenter  |   48h |  56h |
  -----------+-------+------+
</code></pre>
If the Electrician built his own house, he finishes at 68h.  If the Carpenter built his own, he gets done at 104h.<p>If they instead have the Carpenter do all the framing, and the Electrician do all the wiring, the first house is done at 72h, and the second is done at 120h.  (If the Electrician helps to frame whenever not wiring, and the Carpenter helps to wire whenever not framing, completion time for each house is shorter at 47h and 75.5h, but that&#x27;s outside the scope of this example.)  The Electrician only had to do 48h of work instead of 68h, a savings of 20h, and the Carpenter only had to do 96h instead of 104h, a savings of 8h.  Both benefited from the specialization, even though the Carpenter is actually slower at framing than the Electrician.  They have an additional advantage in that they only need one complete set of tools rather than two.  The Electrician takes the wiring tools, and the Carpenter takes the framing tools.<p>They are not refusing to do jobs they don&#x27;t want to do.  They are doing the jobs they are best at doing because it makes them more productive.<p>If you want to start or support a family, travel, pursue interesting hobbies, socialize with friends, experience local culture, or bump any of the metrics you may have for personal success, having money makes all of those things easier and less stressful.  The stress from the acquisition of that money is usually less in magnitude than the advantage it imparts.<p>Most people stop working harder when doing so would detract from their overall enjoyment of life.  Most.<p>As the Dickens quote from David Copperfield goes:<p><pre><code>  Annual income twenty pounds,
  annual expenditure nineteen six,
  result happiness.
  Annual income twenty pounds,
  annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six,
  result misery.
</code></pre>
When survival needs are largely commoditized, the more you earn in excess of your baseline, the more opportunity you have to make choices with whatever is left.  If you like simple pleasures, low earnings are enough to make you happy.  But many people measure success in part by how much they can provide for other people&#x27;s needs in addition to their own.  If you can get all your kids to graduate college without any of them needing loans, I think that&#x27;s a big success.  And you mostly need plain old money to do that.  So you specialize in a job and earn money so that you can help everyone else specialize through trade.<p>If you can specialize in a skill in high demand that few other people are any good at (like engineering), you will almost automatically be successful.