Comment by shaan7 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shaan7 | Hacker News Reader

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Fair enough, by "far fewer" you basically mean the same thing I meant by "some". The point was not to have an exhaustive list of the exact reasons behind people cooking.

> It's common for people to delude themselves into thinking they haven't wasted their time by convincing themselves they did it for fun

I am probably missing some context here because this does not make sense to me. Something is fun because its fun, what does it even mean for someone to forcibly convince themselves of something that is otherwise? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> Just attach a dollar-value to your free time

I do that when someone asks me to do a project for them in my free time, so I can know what to charge them. But there is little value in assigning a dollar-value for time that I am going to spend doing something that _I want to do_ . Its like watching a movie, or making a sand-castle in the backyard. I won't enjoy it if I keep thinking "Damn, I just watched a movie for 3 hours, there goes $300 worth of time."

I mean the minority, which I'm not sure "some" implies. The factors you describe: cheaper, control, health can be seen as the same as cost. More expensive places might taste better, be healthier etc. While I'm sure a lot of people enjoy cooking, I'm not sure many would recreationally cook as often as they need food.

> context

You can have fun imagining the payoffs, only to find they do not appear. Have you ever seen a movie and been disappointed, or played a game and found it lacking. "fun" is not an absolute measure, and review doesn't necessarily capture how fun something is versus how fun you think it ought to be - plenty people give things higher value than their "fun" value, despite claiming to only have done it for fun - the missing value is ideological.

> there is little value in assigning a dollar-value for time that I am going to spend doing something that _I want to do_

Only if there is, some some reason, literally only one thing you want to do. But if there are competing things you might like to do then comparing them makes sense. One way or another, if you choose to watch a movie, or build a sandcastle, you are comparing the two to decide which. Using monetary values is just a more formal way of doing that for larger, less impulsive, projects.

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