You spend a third of your life at work. Better for it to be something you can enjoy and be proud of than not.

Or, from another lens:

My father was an awesome man, and incredible to his family-- and he went on an incredible personal journey with IBM doing cool stuff that he thought was meaningful as part of that, bringing back stories to his family.

(Like making one of the earliest computerized large industrial control system, to automate a cement plant... and the shenanigans that he and his work friends got up to during this time. Or how much he liked the 650, and what an interesting puzzle it was to try and make a fast program. Or indeed, even the things he failed at: at their programming school he was not good with the accounting special-purpose plugboard machines).

Or-- from mine: I won the startup lottery at 22 and "retired" but that did not last long. I am not a happy person without purposeful work. And I am a better person in my family by virtue of that purposeful work.

> Better for it to be something you can enjoy and be proud of than not.

That is obviously true.

Which means that as a society, we utterly fail at this. By design, some asshole above you who is trying to optimize your franchise's or department's KPIs will inevitably take every bit of joy you might derive from work, and optimize it away.

If you are happy with your work, anytime the hiring market weakens, that's a great reason to squeeze more out of you/lower your relative pay. If you are passionate about doing something, that's a great reason to make you a worse offer than they would to someone who doesn't care. If you aren't hitting some indicator that's believed to be incredibly important by someone six corporate levels above you, and your line manager is just a powerless drone with no real agency of their own, prepare to get written up.

An individual can walk away from any particular bad situation there - but the overwhelming majority of jobs across the economy are not ones that will avoid all of this. By definition, most people working will not be able to 'enjoy their work'.

You can win a round of musical chairs, but the players as a whole can't.