Why drives humans to work then sleep and then die?

Question

My question is why do humans go through so many lengths in life, apart from the need to survive, to succeed?

Answer 1

Bad education, trained or programmed to slave system

Answer 2

You dismiss survival as not a major factor when getting food, clothes and shelter is the absolute major one, Nobody likes to die even when miserable working your life away for slave wages while the boss is always away on vacation. Then the urge to merge with the opposite s*x comes in second and is really survival on another level of the species, but is a powerful drive for the individual nevertheless.Then there's a need to have the group, or company you're with, survive, because when you work and your group survives, you survive as a group.

Answer 3

law of nature + imperfection of a living being

Answer 4

The IRS

Answer 5

They also want to be loved and accepted.  They want to be in a relationship.  The most responsible way for a good stable relationship is to work for your family, sleep with your partner, then eventually you die happy knowing you raised good children to carry on your name.  

Answer 6

God us given us the craving for life so most of us can't dare end our life voluntarily but the whole business of life seems futile. It's a blessing that human life is not so long and half of it is consumed during the sleep.

Answer 7

We have a whole system set up to survive. Schools, governments, money, economy, work, etc. If money didn't exist, no one would work. If no one worked, who would bother with the most trivial of professions (labourers) to the more difficult types (scientists, doctors). There'd be no driving force (money), no one would bother, so we'd all die sooner or eventually become extinct.

That's all conditioning. As for sleeping, it's preprogrammed into us to do that, and naturally, to die. Though this isn't exclusive to humans.

Answer 8

the slave drivers

Answer 9

being thrown into this world is what drives you to do this, the mere idea that you exist and that you can no longer do anything about it unless you are too brave to die and just take suicide and since we are not like that we have invented beliefs such as love and hope and money and family to keep us going , we are that creative, stubborn and stupid.

Answer 10

Our current society. I wrote a poem about this called, "We Stand to Fall." I have an interesting philosophy that everything we do is in spite that we'll 'lose' somehow. Nothing is infinite.

It's not a completed poem but here's the stanza I was talking about -

We Stand to Fall

“Those who can laugh without cause have either found the true meaning of happiness or have gone stark raving mad”.  ~Norm Papernick

Why is it that what we do

Is in spite that we will lose

We keep in sight that we’re tying, our own noose.

We know that all of our work, ‘no-fun’

Will all become, work undone.

The same outcome for every brawl;

We, as human beings, we stand to fall.

Answer 11

Psychologically speaking, people work because that fills the psychological needs of self-actualization, self-esteem, and so on. Sleep and die are physiological needs - you get tired due to accumulated fatigue poisons in your system, and sleep gives your body a chance to better clear those fatigue poisons - as you age, your body's ability to clear those poisons gets poorer, and you die. It comes down to Abraham Maslow's theory of needs - the pyramid whose base is the physiological needs, with the psychological needs built above. Seems  a solid theory to me.

Answer 12

Comfort.