All animals need to work to eat if they aren't pets or farm animals. Whether it's hunting, foraging, or leading/protecting a pack, they all contribute to their own survival and that of their community.

Money is a physical representation of goods or services provided to others that are used in trade. It's a human society's version of the same thing that happens in the wild but allows it to happen on a much larger scale.

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There are many answers that can have different approaches. However i would say that we are not the only animal to pay. Bees, ants, etc need to work to sustain their queen, they pay with their work to be part of a group. Apes, lions and many other bigger animals also “pay” their respect to a hierarchy. If not, they are either pushed out of the group or even killed. In mating, many others as birds will need to provide gifts so that the other sex allows to mate.
So they are paying. Not with money as you might be referring to in the question, but there is some kind of transaction.

Money is just an abstracted token of your labor that you trade for goods or labor that you are otherwise not able to get/do for yourself.

It would cost you nothing to wander onto public land and subsist for yourself. But if you are not specialized at it, then you are going to be fighting tooth and nail just to exist.

We don’t pay to live. We work to live and so does every other animal. A lion hunts for food. A Beaver builds it’s dam for shelter.

Humans have figured out that if you specialize in a single activity, and do it better than anyone else, people will trade you for that skill.

For instance one person is a really good house builder and another can grow more food on a plot of land than anyone else. They trade building a house for food or vice versa.

At some point we invented money to represent the value of our work. So now we don’t have to build a house for someone that doesn’t need it but just pay them with dollars. This makes everyone’s value more easily transferable. You don’t need to find someone with excess of what you need and just happens to need the thing your providing.

Even without money, you would be hunting, gathering and building in a state of nature. Money and or paying just makes things easier.

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Because of a long history in which power over others enabled a more comfortable life, which ended up in a lot of people thinking that still applies today but got translated to having a big number associated with them.

Nearly everything a wild animal has or gets is because they went and got it themselves or with the help of a few others. Most are naked and homeless. They are vulnerable to the elements, to predators, and to disease. Most have a very short lifespan. On Maslow's hierarchy of needs, they live at the bottom - survive and reproduce.

Humans have found ways to improve our lot in life and meet our needs for additional development. Some might say because we've evolved to do more with our minds and bodies and time, some might say it's because we are God's children and not animals and have a different destiny for life. Either way, we thrive because we divide up labor and help one another. This division of labor means that I can focus on one thing - producing food, or building shelter, or producing clothing or organizing excel sheets, etc. While others produce one thing, and then in this amazingly complex way we trade what we all do with one another, and we use money to make that happen.

So I organize excel sheets all day because I get money to do that and I trade that money with others who produce food and clothing and gasoline and electricity - so I don't have to.

In aggregate, we work less than animals do and we get more in return for our labor.

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