The study cited by the article below, corresponds to my belief that when employees say that they "like their work" that it means they "like" 1) the money and 2) the routine. Even the personal interactions aren't valuable:
Peculiar_Investor wrote:I said I missed the people/social interactions of the workplace, not necessarily that they were valuable.
Which again points to "routine".
Personally, this study is "common sense". The obvious clue being that one needs to be "paid" to do it. As I've mentioned before, we "like" to do many things that aren't paid. Indeed, we often have to pay to engage in them (e.g. hobbies, vacation/travel, watching movies, etc.)
The reason employees say that they "like their work" is because "routine" is a
confounding variable. A confounding variable is something that isn't accounted for and suggests correlations that don't exist (e.g. "I like work because of the work" vs "I like work because of the routine").
Happiness mapped: why work is the place we feel the worst
Strikingly, our analysis of all these data found that paid work is ranked lower than any of the other 39 activities people engage in, with the exception of being sick in bed. The effect is equivalent to a 7-8% reduction in happiness relative to circumstances in which someone is not working. Time spent in paid work has a similarly bad (in fact, slightly larger) effect on how relaxed people feel.
...
Working continues to be negatively correlated with happiness, even when it is combined with other activities that are pleasurable such as chatting with friends. Plus, even when we account for how relaxed people felt, working continues to be negatively associated with momentary well-being.
Instead, it appears that we would just rather be doing other things than working. This is why economists have long theorised that work is dependent on getting paid to do it
My mistake when analyzing my desire for early retirement is that I only accounted for the variables of "money" and "friendships". I quickly realized that work friendships were superficial and I wouldn't be keeping them (bias-reinforcing examples were talking to retired workers and asking them how many work friends they have post-work and how often they kept in touch).
Even the need to "contribute to society" was debunked in my mind when I talked with people who had 25+ years of tenure. Most, if not all the things that they worked on were obsolete and easily replaceable by someone or something else. Philosophy around meaning of life, etc. also helped me move away from idea of "contribution to society".
Once I decided that "money" was the only reason for working, I decided to accumulate enough to stop working (to me, "working just to work", didn't make much sense). My error was that I didn't account for the confounding variable of "routine".
One needs to replace "money" AND "routine" in order to transition more smoothly from employee to retirement.