I guess another way of looking at this is asking yourself what are you making progress on, and does that progress mean something? For some people, maybe they have a choice of working and their job is helping other people do their jobs more efficiently, ultimately helping a business be more efficient. Then the alternative is to not worry about money, and maybe they like to play a lot of video games. When given these two choices as the likeliest options, it's up to each person to decide what has more meaning... Is it work more, and play less (but it's not no play), or is it play a lot and do basically no work? Maybe working for the business isn't the favorite thing to do but it has many aspects that are at least interesting, it's not so black and white.

That said, many interesting and valuable jobs probably don't get a lot of money even if they take a lot of effort; it's nice to be appreciated for doing a hard job. Spending time to say clean up the environment is a great investment but it's hard for an individual to see the long term benefits until, well, they wait a long time and in that time they need to keep cleaning things up. I'm sure this is very hard to devote oneself to doing unless they had more incentive... Money may just be paper but it can help a lot with motivating people to do important but really dirty tasks... What comes to mind are the brave plumbers who break up "fatbergs" in the London sewers, that's such a gross phenomenon...