Motivation In Life

What do you live for? Why do you go to work every day? These are questions that I ask myself from time to time. I've even asked my friends about it. The answer I often get is that the appropriate response is "Money". I find this response strange, because I do not go to work for the money.

A cheap retort some people have for my statement is that I might as well hand over all the money I earn because I don't need/want it. That's cheap because they know I can't answer that, and more importantly it's beside the question of motivation. I could easily retort that since they aren't working for the air they breathe, why don't they just stop so that I can get more oxygen?

I guess the point is that if one's at work exclusively (or at least primarily) for the money, one will find it hard to stay on when the going gets tough. In fact if I worked for money, I'd just go to another place that offered more money. Because the work doesn't matter. I guess that's one way to live, but it's largely without a true aim. There's no end point to money, and honestly the applications of money can be somewhat limited. At some point you have so much money you don't really know what to do with it. But before you can get there, you'd probably need a good dose of passion.

Passion is what gets people up even if the work's painful, and I guess that means one needs to work in a line which one likes. In some smaller economies that's just not possible, but should one have the fortune to do so I think one just doesn't work another day in their life. Ultimately, with passion, one has a motivation besides money to keep doing a good job, which tends to improve one's skills, which tends to attract money anyway. Interesting, no?