The main thing I see in your experience (and also from other comments here), is that having a community is important, and having something fun or exciting to do

The main thing I see in your experience (and also from other comments here), is that having a community is important, and having something fun or exciting to do at work, with that community, goes a long way to keep ourselves motivated. An analogy to this is most people have chores to do at home, and if that's all they did at home and always by themselves, they'd probably burn out pretty soon. But if they could play video games with a couple friends, or have some people over for lunch once or twice a week, then the chores would be a lot easier to bear.