Sometimes I can’t tell whether a question here is genuine and the author is interested in the answers, or whether they just copy-paste something to keep people busy. How am I supposed to approach that?
Sometimes I can’t tell whether a question here is genuine and the author is interested in the answers, or whether they just copy-paste something to keep people busy. How am I supposed to approach that?
Hooray, Karma it is…
But seriously, I do that distinction as well. I consider some things as work. I’ll do it for example for the money, could be Karma or whatever, and at the end of the day I try not to care if my labor has been wasted, as I mainly wanted the money. And then in the afternoon I’ll do things for fun. And I love the more human motives there. I get to help people, connect to them on a human level. I volunteer stuff or just talk casually or have fun. And it’s really refreshing how it’s devoid of some numbers which increase on my bank account or in my profile.
There’s another interesting quality of your “afternoon work”: if you didn’t do it, nobody else would. Paid work is by definition fungible: there’s an economic demand for it, so logically if you don’t do then somebody else will. Net benefit of your labor: zero! But when you work on some project from other motivations, you know that the marginal utility of your labor is 100%. Nobody’s paying for it so it might never get done otherwise. It took me a while to grasp this but IMO it’s an important latent motivation for volunteering.
Good take. Well… I just watched too much Star Trek when I was young. They live in a post-scarcity future. Just did away with the first thing, and do everything just because they like to do it, and with most things portrayed in the series it’s at the forefront, and no one has done it before… And “utility” becomes yet a different thing. 😉