Let’s be real. Most Monday mornings feel like a personal affront. You’re staring at the coffee maker, wondering why you’re about to spend eight hours looking at spreadsheets or attending meetings that could have been an email. We do it for the money. Obviously. But if you dig into the psychology of labor, the reasons we go to work are actually a lot weirder and more complex than just paying the rent.
Work is a massive part of our identity. It’s usually the first or second thing people ask you at a party. "So, what do you do?" It’s a shortcut for understanding who someone is.
The Real Drivers Behind Why We Go to Work
Think about the Marienthal study from the 1930s. It’s an old one, but it’s still the gold standard for understanding what happens when work disappears. Researchers looked at a small Austrian village where the main factory closed down. Even though people were getting government support—meaning they had enough to eat—they fell apart. They lost their sense of time. They stopped participating in social clubs. Their sense of self-worth basically evaporated.
Money wasn’t the problem; the lack of structure was.
Psychologist Marie Jahoda later used this to identify the "latent functions" of employment. Basically, we go to work because it gives us five things we can't easily find elsewhere: a time structure for the day, social contact outside the family, collective effort toward a goal, social status, and activity.
Honestly, without a place to be at 9:00 AM, most of us just drift. We need the friction. We need the "push" of a deadline to feel like we’re actually moving.
It’s Not Just About the "Grind"
The modern conversation is obsessed with "the grind" or "hustle culture." It’s exhausting. But there’s a nuance here that often gets missed. There’s a massive difference between being exploited and finding "flow."
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi—the guy who literally wrote the book on Flow—found that people are actually happier at work than they are at home, even if they claim otherwise. Why? Because at work, the challenges usually match our skills. We have clear goals and immediate feedback. At home, we’re often just sitting on the couch, which leads to "psychic entropy" or just feeling blah.
Work forces us into a state of focus. It’s one of the few places where we’re pushed to be the best version of our professional selves.
Why We Go to Work is Changing (Fast)
The 2020s flipped the script. Remote work showed us that the "where" of work is flexible, but the "why" stayed the same. However, we're seeing a huge shift in what people expect from their employers.
The "Great Resignation" or "Quiet Quitting" wasn't just about people being lazy. It was a mass realization that the social contract was broken. If you’re going to spend 40 hours a week doing something, it shouldn’t just be for a billionaire's third yacht. You want a piece of the meaning.
👉 See also: QBE Stock Price ASX: What Most People Get Wrong
- Autonomy: People want to own their time.
- Competence: We want to be good at what we do.
- Relatedness: We want to like the people we’re stuck with in Zoom calls.
If these three things are missing, the reason we go to work becomes purely transactional. And transactional relationships are brittle. They break the moment a better offer comes along or the stress gets too high.
The Misconception of the "Dream Job"
Stop looking for a dream job. It doesn’t exist.
Every job has "the suck." Every single one. Even professional travelers have to deal with delayed flights and food poisoning. Even famous musicians have to deal with grueling rehearsals and annoying managers.
The goal isn't to find a job that’s 100% fun. It’s to find work where the "suck" is worth the payoff. This is what Amy Wrzesniewski, a professor at Yale, calls "job crafting." It’s the idea that you don’t find meaning—you build it. You tweak your tasks and your relationships at work until the role fits you better.
The Economic Reality No One Mentions
We can talk about psychology all day, but we can't ignore the math. Wages have been stagnant relative to productivity for decades. The Economic Policy Institute has tracked this "productivity-pay gap" since 1979.
We are working harder and producing more, but the financial "why" is becoming harder to justify for the average person. When housing prices outpace wage growth by double digits, the motivation to "go to work" starts to feel like running on a treadmill that's slightly too fast.
This is why we’re seeing a surge in side hustles and the "creator economy." People are trying to reclaim the value of their labor. They want to work, but they want the rewards to be theirs.
The Biological Need for Achievement
Humans are wired to solve problems. It’s an evolutionary trait. If our ancestors didn’t have the drive to "work" (hunting, gathering, building shelter), they died. Our brains reward us with dopamine when we complete a task.
🔗 Read more: Converting 60 pounds to dollars: What most people get wrong about exchange rates
That’s why checking off a to-do list feels so good. We go to work to feed that biological hunger for achievement. Even if the task is just fixing a bug in some code or finishing a sales deck, that hit of "I did that" is powerful.
How to Make Work... Actually Work
If you’re feeling burnt out, it’s probably because your reasons for going to work have become unbalanced. You’re likely leaning too hard on the "money" side because the "meaning" or "social" side is empty.
- Audit your social capital. Do you actually talk to anyone at work about non-work stuff? If not, you’re missing out on the primary reason humans have worked together for millennia.
- Define your "Zone of Genius." What are you actually good at? If you spend 90% of your day doing stuff you’re bad at, you’re going to hate it.
- Set hard boundaries. Work is a part of life, not the whole thing. The most productive people are usually the ones who know when to stop.
- Look for the "End User." Who does your work actually help? Even if you’re a cog in a giant machine, that machine is doing something for someone. Finding that connection can change your entire outlook.
The reality is that we go to work because we have to, but we stay and thrive because we find something there—a friend, a challenge, or a sense of purpose—that makes the Monday morning alarm a little less painful. It’s a messy, frustrating, essential part of being human.
The next step is to stop waiting for your job to give you meaning and start looking at where you can carve it out for yourself. Look at your calendar for next week. Find one task that actually makes you feel capable and double down on it. Ignore the fluff. Focus on the craft. That’s how you survive the 9-to-5.