To me one of the ultimate puzzles in life is the motivation for working on puzzles. Case in point: Every day I work on solving a word puzzle that I see in the newspaper.
I spend time working on that puzzle even though I receive no reward other than solving the puzzle. But it gets even stranger than that.
I’ve realized that I work on the daily puzzle precisely because it is a perfectly recreational activity. If someone were to offer to pay me to engage in exactly that same activity every day, I would probably not do it.