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?

  • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    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.

    • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deOP
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      2 days ago

      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. 😉