I should clarify. By “long term” I mean longer term than one week.

Get some goals that the job feeds into. This can be:

• Saving money to buy something (example: you want to travel to Italy, so you’re saving for plane tickets. Going to work means earning money for this)
• Gathering work experience to prepare yourself for something (example: you want to be a counselor, and dealing with shitty retail customers allows you to practice your patience for when your clients are frustrating)
• Directly achieving the goal with your job (example: you think lead is bad in water, and your job is replacing lead pipes for the city of Denver)

This is three different types of long term goal that can make your monday morning meaningful.

Monday sucks when all your reasons for getting up are negative. Examples of negative meaning are:

• You don’t want to get yelled at by your boss
• You don’t want to lose your job
• You don’t want to be evicted
• You don’t want to be lazy

If all the meaning that’s getting you out of bed on Monday morning is like the above, your life is basically a living hell. Being motivated by fear sucks really bad.

Finding goals that are positive lets you be motivated by desire, which feels much better. Positive goal examples:

• Travel to Italy
• Practice being cool when faced with people freaking out
• Reduce the amount of lead people are consuming

It takes a while to get the hang of it, but organizing one’s life as being motivated by desire makes life so much better you can’t even imagine it.