Why do we do the things we do?
Monetary incentive
Money is the only scalable & sustainable way to get collective groups of strangers to collaborate (an Economy). For this purpose, it is an objective bearer of value agreeable to everyone, despite the object of value being often subjective (i.e. a good appraised by the buyer in a trade, or a market value by the collective set by supply and demand)
Money is an external incentive for an individual, bound to an economic machine1 and stringed to their existence - we have to earn money, whether we like it or not - Nobody loves being a data labeler sifting through the sewage of the internet all day. Nobody loves assembling pieces of smart phones on an assembly line.
Value creation process
The value creation process (a job) often needs to be repeatable in itself, because…
- Physical needs are a constant - food, security, etc. We need them today, tomorrow, and all the days after
- Most jobs to make such ends meet are industrialized in some way: mass production of goods with some standard
- Why it’s pretty tough to do creative work as a job, which requires level of 沉淀 / distillation like art
- Despite the massive demand of entertainment, the creative process is not repeatable and fundamentally at odds with industrial process: you can’t churn out truly creative work like an assembly line2, but your physical needs tick against you in their due cadence
- True creativity requires high level of Agency in the work, but that agency is not found in most jobs
- Why it’s pretty tough to do creative work as a job, which requires level of 沉淀 / distillation like art
A: Jobs are often alienating (why they suck), but we do them nevertheless, because we have to
Non-monetary incentive
Maybe I’m an idealist to the core, but I always try to remind myself that money is only a bearer (and therefore a proxy) to value. That is, while almost everything requires / can be made transactional with money, money by itself does not entirely make up for why we do things for one another. A provider provides service to another (say, teaching English), because, well, both the provider and the consumers see certain intrinsic value in that service.
There has to be a mover other than money, cultural in some way. At least it makes me happy in believing that and aligning my personal values in the things I do. It’s hollowing for me to operate entirely off of monetary incentives, if there’s nothing for that money to convert to - Value conversion problem
Examples: volunteering, public goods, building things, Play
- Open source as a public good? Gift economy?