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Comment by Delmania | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I find myself falling for this, I keenly remember the advice given to me from Your Money or Your Life, which is that you are at work for 1 reason and 1 reason only: money.

Many people say they work for other reasons, like socialization, meaning, etc. Robinson (the author) makes a point that you can find these things in volunteer activities, and that your loyalty ends at the paycheck. Your company will not hesitant to eliminate you when it's financially viable. Why should you be any different?

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Because your incentives are different from your company's incentives.

I'm working for money, but why can't I "double up" these working hours to also get socialization and meaning out of them? Sure, I could volunteer, but that's not an efficient use of my time.

Because you don't have to have only one reason to work. I mean, everybody needs some amount of money for basic neccessities, but after that, it's a complicated equation of different priorities. And if you choose money only, then you're spending the best time of your day maximizing only one resources, while letting everything else take the back seat. Why do it if you can get socialization and meaning from work too?

Also, I don't understand your point about company not being hesitant to eliminate you. Yes, but so what? There are two parties in the work-for-hire transactions, and of course, both parties are looking out for their own self-interest. I see no reason why they should extract the same exact resources from this transaction, though.

Some context is needed. The goal of Your Money or Your Life was to get more people familiar with financial independence, the idea being once you have saved enough to "retire" early, you can pick the projects you work on and the people you work with. So in that case, yes, you do optimize for resources.

> the idea being once you have saved enough to "retire" early

That assumes that you have a very high natural ability to lay off gratification to pursue your goals. If so, good for you, most people don't, and this quality (conscientiousness from the big 5) is not really mutable above very early age. So, if you do try such a strategy, most likely you will fail because you don't have willpower for it, won't be able to suffer through the job that you hate and took only for the money, and will hate yourself for it.

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