>Long-term planning/deferred gratification. You were setting up a career as a source of status later in life.

It sounds like you're tying yourself up in knots to explain something that everybody already understands. Math is intrinsically fun, but only if you can cut through the ruinously bad educational system and the difficulty of getting started.

Such intrinsic interest to that extent was sexually selected for, so we're doing it only because of that. That's all I'm saying.

Intrinsic motivation makes sense to learn about the world to some extent, but there was not much to learn for hunter-gatherers to survive.