You think what you want is money, but what you really want is meaning.
Thought
Many aspects of people's daily work can feel meaningless. We often rationalize this and learn to tolerate it because these seemingly pointless activities lead to a salary. In this case, the salary provides us with meaning. Money becomes a means to an end, serving as the source of that meaning.
I often reflect on the struggle Markus Persson, aka "Notch," faced after he sold Minecraft to Microsoft for $2.5 billion. It must have been incredibly difficult to turn down such a lucrative offer, but it can also be just as challenging to rediscover the same meaning Minecraft had given him. At the end of the day, we are not like Grigori Perelman, who can solve one of the Millennium Prize Problems but turned down both the Fields Medal and the Millennium Prize.
I first thought about this question more frequently during my compulsory military service in Taiwan, where many of my comrades felt like they were wasting their lives. It was during that time that I first understood what Friedrich Nietzsche meant when he said, "If you know why to live, you can bear almost any how."