"Play" is doing something you want to do. "Work" is doing something someone else wants you to do or needs to be done. The former gives you complete agency, th

"Play" is doing something you want to do. "Work" is doing something someone else wants you to do or needs to be done. The former gives you complete agency, the latter is a reduction of your agency. If that something is valuable enough to someone they will pay for someone else to do that thing they can't or don't want to do (the pay is necessarily related to the value they have assigned as well as the retention of their agency in the matter). Of course they have to find that someone else that is willing to do that something for the pay offered, which means that someone else has to weigh whether the loss of agency is worth the payment offered to them. It is not so much that "we love to do the actual core activity" since there are few programmers that would enjoy being constrained to constantly re-implementing basic CRUD functionality for months or years. We instead love the core activity driven by our own agency, doing what we want simply because the reward is satisfying that want.