I mean, the answer is agency. You enjoy doing things that you choose to do—which you choose to do because you enjoy them, it’s just a tad selective and cyclic there.
Most people don’t choose to work because they enjoy it; they work to survive, doing what the market will support.
Some few very very lucky people get to do work they would otherwise choose to do anyways.
I feel like below a certain wage threshold, jobs are made shitty on purpose.
There is no need for a cashier to stand all the time, a small and high chair would suffice. There are boards used by mechanics to slide around on the shop floor when working beneath cars, but there are no carts for workers filling up lower shelves. Etc.
I worked in engineering and now process management and I could exit most B2C shops screaming of frustration for their inefficiency and spiteful brutalism.
Ergonomics is one of the main factors for worker health, happiness and productivity, but if you have literal wage slaves, you can even save the peanuts. True Greed.
And that’s probably because they exported a lot of their German ethic and if you’d take away German cashiers‘ chairs, you’d be in trouble more quickly than you can spell aldi
The cross section of companies willing to pay poverty wages and companies ok with/happy to make your life suck all day is depressing but not surprising.
From what I remember from college, I think what you're talking about is mostly about intrinsic motivation vs. extrinsic motivation, into which there's a lot of research. Just adding it in case someone wanted to look more into it, and was looking for some keywords.
It's one of the things that's worth knowing about, because you can somehow work around it to get motivated better, and it's one of the more important topics in game design. So, in general a usefull piece of psychology knowledge.