So I think just with famous games we can see that billions of people love to "deal with problems". Games by definition are problems we love to solve. They can be solo, duel, last one standing, 2 teams, N teams, synchronous, asynchronous, turn by turn, etc.
This makes me think on the contrary we are addicted to solving problems. The question then IMHO is more... what are the right problems for you? How do you keep on being challenged just the right way?
I suspect that very few of those 800 million chess players get paid to play chess all day every day as a job. More likely, it's an occasional hobby in their free time, which is great. Even at that, they only represent 10% of the 8 billion people on earth, which suggests that it's a small minority of people who actually care about solving puzzles. And of those, an even smaller number actually apply those skills to do it for a living.
What I'm trying to say is that if I were no longer paid to write code I might just end up with hobbies that occasionally stimulated my mind as opposed to having to constantly engage that muscle. Motivation makes a big difference, because even for those of us who compulsively solve puzzles there is plenty of time for ennui.
Is it though? "it is estimated that the number of Chess players is about 800 million globally." according to https://www.chessjournal.com/how-many-chess-players-are-ther... I've read ~600M for Mahjong, CS/PUBG/etc right now tally up to few millions on Steam via https://steamcharts.com etc.
So I think just with famous games we can see that billions of people love to "deal with problems". Games by definition are problems we love to solve. They can be solo, duel, last one standing, 2 teams, N teams, synchronous, asynchronous, turn by turn, etc.
This makes me think on the contrary we are addicted to solving problems. The question then IMHO is more... what are the right problems for you? How do you keep on being challenged just the right way?