Am I Playing Minecraft Wrong?

I've been playing Minecraft since it came out "back in the day". Over the years, I've been a part of a few multi-year servers, one of which has lasted for around 8+ years. Today, I run a Minecraft server for a group of youth and they play differently than I do.

I love exploring, building, exploring some more, building infrastructure, farms, etc.

The youth seem to want to "win" and "beat" the server as fast as possible. After a few weeks, they complain that the server feels boring and there's nothing left to do.

Have I been playing Minecraft wrong all these years???