&gt; It can certainly be internalized to the point of being &quot;normal&quot; and &quot;comfortable&quot;, but still requires that focus<p>I would argue that there&#x27;s a feedback loop in this particular case between the requirement of such effort, and the ability to generate it. The same sort of flow-state you get from e.g. playing Minecraft, also exists in the real-world equivalent of survivalist bootstrapping. Our brains were evolved to be <i>stimulated by</i> the survival tasks of our ancestral environments: moreso foraging and hunting than farming, but even farming still comes with very natural-to-us acts like crafting tools, clearing land, building shelter, herding animals, etc.<p>I think a lot of the dissonance between the modern values of convenience and efficiency&#x2F;laziness, and the agricultural-era idea of a &quot;work ethic&quot;, was simply that certain kinds of things that are &quot;a LOT of work&quot; just feel natural to humans, in ways where they&#x27;re still work (and drudgery, at that, sometimes), but not nearly as <i>draining</i> to one&#x27;s long-term motivation as modern &quot;abstract&quot; work is. Nobody ever got suffered from &quot;burn-out&quot; making nails to build their own house—which is amazing when you think about the level of toil involved. The sheer direct intuitiveness of the goal being pursued—make exactly enough nails to get a roof over one&#x27;s head and keep out the cold—overrides a lot of the the feeling of repetitiveness of the base-level action.<p>(A dystopia belonging in an SMBC comic: a nail factory that used to be staffed with robots, but which is now staffed with humans wearing VR goggles having the times of their lives making nails because they believe they&#x27;re doing it for direct survival reasons. Then the nails are used to build the crappy box-like apartments they pay for with their wages and go home to.)