More specifically, I suspect that art is created mainly for four reasons:

1) Urge: many artists seem to have a compulsion to create (sometimes, to create oddly specific things). They make art to satisfy this urge. In this category, I would also include art that is mainly motivated by helping the artist achieve the flow state that they are seeking, as well as art that is made to help the artist process their own experiences. For instance, “The Race Track” is a 35-inch painting that Pinkham Ryder spent literal years working on, “building up layers of paint, resin, and varnish…He used unorthodox materials such as candle wax and bitumen. In his urgency, he wouldn’t wait for each layer to dry and was often painting into wet varnish or brushing fast-drying paint into slow-drying paint” (the Washington Post reports). He painted it in response to an experience he had: a friend told him he planned to bet $500 on a horse and then died by suicide when the horse lost. This kind of work is the artist making something for themself, or because they feel like they can’t NOT make it. Sometimes, art created out of compulsion appeals to art lovers, but sometimes, it only appeals to the artist themself. 

2) Beauty: people love Monet for the stunning beauty of his paintings (often landscapes). If there is a deeper meaning beyond “I’ve captured something of great beauty and done so in a beautiful way,” I can’t figure out what that thing is. More often than not, I think that the sort of art that regular people and art lovers (as opposed to art collectors) buy for themselves is simply what they find beautiful or what they find that creates a pleasing vibe.

3) Emotion: lots of art aims less at beauty and more at stirring emotions or provoking interesting thoughts. Examples include the Fountain by Duchamp (a porcelain urinal signed “R. Mutt”) or the Treachery of Images by Magritte (a painting of a pipe with the French phrase, “This is not a pipe” written beneath it). This can be the deepest form of art, but it is often hard to distinguish it from bullshit: the line between deep and bullshit is a thin one. But even if you think works like The Fountain and The Treachery of Images suck, it’s hard to deny that they at least provoke thought (though this cannot necessarily be said for the endless derivatives that now exist that riff on these themes). I would also put political art, as well as art that just aims to amuse, in this category of art that is about generating emotion or producing thoughts in the viewer. Another more specific example of art that appears to be about emotion rather than beauty is Artemisia Gentilesch’s painting Judith Slaying Holofernes (which depicts the assassination of a general by the Israelite heroine Judith). Even if you find the painting heinous, it’s hard not to feel something when you look at it. Note I had originally used Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son as an example here, but as Gwern pointed out, that was actually an example of painting done out of obsession, not for stirring emotions in others. Much of this kind of art is aimed at producing visceral emotions rather than intellectual thoughts. Art that evokes emotion is sometimes beautiful, but often it is ugly, shocking, or confusing. 

4) Playing Status Games: Art is a way for people to show off that they are in the know about what’s cool, that they have sophisticated and refined taste, and that they have lots of money. For instance, a member of the Saudi royal family purchased a Da Vinci painting (Salvator Mundi) for $450 million. As another example, Bored Ape #4580 (an NFT linked to an image of an ape wearing 3D glasses) sold for $1.9 million. Obviously, these were not purchased due to the great emotion or beauty evoked by these images. People buy these things because they want you to believe something about them (or, in some cases, less cynically but more pathetically because they are trying to convince themselves that they are cool). Collecting artworks is especially well-suited to status signaling because it better enables claims of connoisseurship and sophistication compared to buying, say, a yacht or private jet. Like everyone, artists want to make money, and some will lean into the social signaling aspects of art rather than creating art that they feel the need to create or rather than trying to make something deep or beautiful.

But, considering just these four motivations for making art, how do they work against each other?

Well, since most of the money in art comes from very wealthy people who are trying to signal status (to others, but also, sometimes to themselves), this warps the art market (especially what gets attention). For instance, it appears to have a really negative influence on what is shown in some galleries and museums (showing art that is about what it signals about the owner and viewer rather than art that is about the artist, beauty, or the emotion it creates in the viewer). 

I suspect that most people who go to museums and galleries want a combination of (1) learning about the interesting minds and lives of the artists, (2) seeing things of great beauty, and (3) seeing things that move them or make them think. 

Unfortunately, more often than is ideal, they see a lot of status signaling (sometimes it’s of the form “look how one-of-a-kind this is,” “sometimes it’s “look how expensive this is,” “and sometimes it’s “look how incomprehensible this is; if you were more sophisticated, maybe you’d understand”).

Most artists who toil away at making whatever they feel the urge to create, or whatever they find beautiful, or whatever they think will make people feel and think, are typically not going to make works that are effective at status signaling. So there is a subworld of artists producing works for wealthy people to use to signal status, and this stuff gets way overrepresented in museums, galleries, and the media relative to its value as art (as opposed to its monetary value in terms of what people will pay for it).

If what you want is beauty on your walls, you can simply get an inexpensive print or replica of your favorite works of all time. But people who play the art game would rather spend a lot of money on something unattractive than spend a small amount of money on something far more beautiful. In fact, ugliness makes something BETTER status signaling because lots of people can appreciate something beautiful, but only those most in the know (with the most evolved and sophisticated taste) can appreciate something that is shit. 

Sometimes literally. Piero Manzoni filled 90 tin cans with his own excrement. Christie’s auctioned off tin number 51 for $161,000 (unfortunately, the artist had already passed away, so I don’t think he got to experience his shit being worth more than gold).

So if you suspect that a lot of art that gets famous is bad, you’re honestly probably right, but that’s mainly because a certain kind of bad is good status signaling, and this crowds out attention from work that is more beautiful and more thought-provoking.

Thanks to Hunter Muir, Barry Galef, and Gwern for their comments, which were especially valuable in helping me improve this essay.

This piece was first written on November 11, 2023, and first appeared on this site on December 16, 2023.

(1) Human groups have pretty much always done unspeakably horrible things to other groups (e.g., think mass murder and numerous forms of oppression). And fairly often, while it is happening, this evil seems to be condoned, supported, or only passively opposed by a large and fairly culturally representative group, rather than by just a few very bad people.

Are we humans evil?

(2) On the other hand, the vast majority of people feel sympathetic when they see people suffering (even realistic depictions of suffering in movies), and are willing to help people they don’t know at some inconvenience to themselves in the right circumstances. For instance, if an elderly stranger passes out in an office building elevator when only one other person is there, most likely that other person would try to help, even if it caused them to be late to work. In other words, the vast majority of people are at least moderately pro-social, have some compassion for strangers, and will at least sometimes inconvenience themselves to help others when they don’t expect to gain anything out of it.

Are we humans good?

Originally I attempted to explain these phenomena using the idea of “mimicry” that people just copy what others do, so if people are harming others, people will copy and do it too, but I no longer think that really gets at the core of the issue (though I do think mimicry plays a certain role, as you’ll see).

Below is my attempt to reach a simplified explanation for the seeming contradiction between (1) and (2). This theory is by no means novel. If there is anything novel about it, it’s in the particular way of combining the various pieces, or trying to fill out certain details.

So what’s going on with our species?

We humans seem to automatically divide others into “moral groups.” In our minds, each of these moral groups has an implicit “moral weight.” A group’s moral weight determines:

• whether you think the fates of members of that group are important (high moral weight) or irrelevant (low moral weight)
• whether you see it as good to help a member of that group (high moral weight) or acceptable to harm a member of that group (low moral weight)

If harming a certain group (call it “group X”) is considered both acceptable AND happens to be useful, convenient, or a way to reduce perceived danger, then murder or subjugation of group X may ensue with little guilt. In other words, if one group assigns group X a low moral weight, and there is some additional reason why harming group X seems useful, then that harm may well occur.

The simplest example of this is the way we kill insects regularly without a second thought. But the distinction of being assigned very low moral weight is not just reserved for insects. We humans unfortunately sometimes do it to other human groups.

Some small percentage of people in our society view killing insects as morally unacceptable. Similarly, in societies where the majority generally assigns essentially no moral weight to group X and plans to massacre or oppress group X, there will usually be a minority of conscientious objectors who protest it. According to this model, this occurs because (for various reasons) this minority assigns a different moral weight to group X than the majority.

Here are some examples of common groups people might assign different moral weights to:

• “family member”
• “friend”
• “child (my own)”
• “child (not my own)”
• “person I am interacting with right now”
• “neighbor”
• “citizen of my country”
• “person I’ve met before but don’t really know”
• “person of my religion”
• “criminal”
• “white person”
• “black person”
• “murderer”
• “celebrity”
• “French person”
• “friend of a friend”
• “co-worker”
• “foreigner from somewhere unfamiliar”
• “human being”
• “cow”

People can fall into different groups, each group having varying moral weights, making it more complex than an in-group/out-group binary. If someone falls into multiple groups, then the moral weight assigned to that person is some complex combination of the moral weights of the different groups they belong to. In some cases, it seems to be the maximal moral weight of any group they belong to (e.g., a parent would usually be treated as being in the parent group regardless of what other groups they fall into), but sometimes we focus on the lowest moral weights (e.g., a work colleague who was also a murderer may end up getting a moral weight closer to that of a murderer than of any other work colleague).

I’ve identified six factors that seem to be predictive of how much moral weight a person assigns to a given group. Moral weight seems to be higher for:

1. Relation: groups that share a person’s genetics (e.g., “parent”). This has an obvious evolutionary explanation as a gene propagation mechanism. Many people feel we have the strongest moral obligations to our family members.

2. Enjoyment: groups that we enjoy interacting with (e.g., “friends” or “puppies”). For instance, people are more comfortable screwing over a person they dislike than a person they like.

3. Familiarity: groups we are highly familiar with or spend a lot of time with (e.g., “work colleagues”). Almost everyone would save a long time acquaintance over a stranger they’ve just met if forced to make a choice.

4. Similarity: groups we perceive as similar to ourselves or that we group ourselves with (e.g. “people of our own country” or “people of our own religion”). People feel a heightened duty to protect others from their country, religion, etc.

5. Safety: groups we are not afraid of or view as non-threatening (e.g., this would exclude “sharks” and “violent criminals”). People often feel justified in harming someone in “self-defense.”

6. Innocence: groups we feel are innocent rather than capable of being sinful or responsible for their actions (e.g., “children”). There is something that people find particularly repugnant about harming children, or anyone helpless.

As mentioned before, a classic example of a group who the majority view as having near-zero moral weight is “insect.” Insects (1) hardly share any genetics in common with us, (2) we don’t like interacting with them, (3) we don’t generally spend much time with them (at least, not on purpose), (4) we don’t perceive them as similar to ourselves, and (5) we often view them as a threat. The only thing they have going for them is that we may or may not view them as innocent, but I suspect a lot of people view them as guilty because sometimes they seem to be intentionally bothering us.

Chickens do slightly better than insects on these criteria. Those who interact with them tend to enjoy it a lot more than interacting with insects, and they seem more similar to us than insects, but mostly we treat them as having low moral weight as well (which helps explain why it’s so common to eat them).

To give a few more examples:

• Cats (in the U.S., anyway) do much better on the criteria 2-6 than chickens, so we assign them much higher moral weight than chickens.
• People of our own country do much better on criteria 2-4 than people of other countries.
• Family members usually do much better on criteria 1-5 than people of our own country.
• Violent criminals typically don’t do well on criteria 1-6, and, empirically, people often seem willing to strip rights away from this group, and in some cases, have them executed.

Circling back to our original question with this model in mind, how do we rectify the seeming contradiction that:

(1) most people are pro-social

(2) human groups do unspeakably horrible things to other groups

According to this model, the answer is simple. When one group assigns almost no moral weight to another group, they are willing to do horrible things to do that group. To them, it is simply not morally problematic, because that’s what moral weight MEANS. However, when that group has a reasonable amount of moral weight assigned (e.g. “person who works in my office building”), they are happy to be helpful and generally act pro-socially. A small percentage of people are truly sociopathy, and assign low moral weight to everyone. But the far more common thing is to assign high moral weight to some groups, and low moral weight to others (influenced by factors 1-6 above).

So, instead of: “are we humans fundamentally good, or not?”, the question becomes: “who are we good to?”

Now, this doesn’t mean that a group WANTS to destroy all groups they assign a low moral weight to. You may assign low moral weight to insects, but that doesn’t mean you spend your weekends trying to find insects to harm. All that low moral weight means is that you are WILLING to do harm if it happens to be advantageous. If an incentive to destroy or control the group is added (e.g., the group is viewed as threatening or useful), then the mass murder or mass oppression may begin.

If this simple theory is reasonably accurate, then it suggests that most of the greatest evils of humanity are not the evils of individual bad actors, but the evil of assigning little moral weight to other groups, combined with the view that it would be “useful” to harm that low moral weight group.

When these groups are across borders, we get war and mass murder. When these groups are ethnic, it can lead to genocide. When these groups are across gender, it can lead to the mass oppression of women or the murder of female babies. When these groups are across species, we get large scale mistreatment of animals in factory farms.

But where do these assignments of moral weight come from? Here are some possible factors:

(i) Mimicry: to a significant extent, we copy the moral weights that we are implicitly taught by the people around us, especially when we’re growing up. So if, as a child, we see that our family members don’t assign any moral weight to group X, we learn not to assign a moral weight to group X as well. This is, I think, where mimicry does come into play.

(ii) Bad actors: sometimes, individual bad actors that are influential in a group, call it group “A,” convince others in group A to assign less moral weight to another group X. This may be for their own selfish reasons, or because they themselves assign a low moral weight to X and want others to as well. The bad actor may cause group A to assign a less moral weight to X by appealing to factor (D), the idea that group X is very different than group A, such as by highlighting differences between A and X or causing group X to stand out even more. Another option is for the bad actor to try to leverage (E), the idea that group X is harmful or dangerous. They may also do this by taking advantage of factor (F), the idea that group X is not innocent, for example, by blaming something that happened a long time ago on that group, even if it poses no threat today.

(iii) Danger: stability and safety in our society seem to influence the assignment of moral weights. It seems that, on average, the less we can trust those around us, and the more we have to fear danger, the more narrowly we define which groups have a high moral weight, and the more we rely on factors A-F to decide who matters. For instance, if you are trying to survive during wartime and barely have enough to eat, you may be more likely to only assign a substantial moral weight to your closest family members, whereas as danger lessens, you may start increasing the moral weight that you assign to neighbors.

(iv) Genetics: It’s also possible that genetic differences exist as well in how we assign moral weights to others, since there is at least some genetic variation in quite a number of traits. For instance, it could be that some people are just born more compassion than others, and are therefore more prone to assign higher moral weights to more groups than others are, all else being equal.

There have been a number of attempts to cause people to more broadly assign higher moral weight, such as in certain Buddhist traditions, the Effective Altruism movement, and, perhaps, the Hippie movement. One common theme of such movements is an unusually large amount of vegetarianism and veganism since, as the expanding “moral circle” (as its sometimes called) begs the question of whether other species should be included.

Creating widespread change in the assignment of moral weight seems as valuable as it is challenging, it strikes me as an extremely valuable project. If the simplified model suggested above is at least modestly accurate, then, causing a more broad and uniform assignment of moral weight could go a long way toward preventing future evils that we humans tend to inflict on each other. What’s more, when we assign reasonably high moral weight to a group we do more than prevent harm: we tend to actively help it, even where personal benefit is unlikely.

It would be nice if this were a valid argument (since then more units sold = more societal benefit). Unfortunately, it’s not valid.

To help put the argument to rest, here’s a list of 13 situations where a product that doesn’t add net value to the world may still get bought in large quantities:

[Note: I like entrepreneurship a great deal and think, on-net, it has added huge amounts of benefit to the world, but I don’t like flawed arguments that make it sound automatically beneficial when it’s not.]

INACCURATE/INCOMPLETE INFORMATION

(1) a product doesn’t actually provide the benefit that it claims to, yet the marketing is persuasive (and it’s difficult to tell after whether or not you got that promised value)

• Numerous supplement companies today whose products don’t do what is claimed. People buy not because they get value but because they think they will (and they keep using it because it can be hard to tell if the benefit is occurring – for instance, whether it’s really reducing your chance of serious illness).

(2) the product benefits most users, but it harms a small number of users so much that it nets out as negative

• A slightly effective treatment for a mild disease that occasionally produces deadly allergic reactions. People buy because they want the slightly effective treatment, but the harm for those who are allergic is so great that in total, the impact is highly negative.

(3) the product adds value to the purchaser, but less value than its competitors would have offered, yet its marketing is more successful than its competitors

• Accounting software that is well below average in usefulness, but it has a much more effective marketing team than other accounting software companies. People buy it because they recognize the brand, but they would have been better off if they hadn’t heard of this brand because then they would have used one of the better competitor products.

EXPLOITING IRRATIONALITY

(4) the product is addictive, and while users get pleasure out of it, many vastly over-consume it (relative to their own preferences), making the experience net negative overall.

• Video games that have been optimized purely for addictiveness (rather than for fun), for instance, making you feel bad when you stop playing. People keep playing and paying even though they are doing it more than they themselves would choose.

(5) the product takes advantage of our tendencies to small overweight probabilities of very large benefit

• Lotteries that are specifically targeted to extremely poor people who really shouldn’t be spending that much money on lotteries. The consumer buys because of their hope that one day they will win (which is an exaggerated hope because we humans struggle to deal with tiny probabilities) in combination with the direct enjoyment of playing (which is potentially real enjoyment, but not enough alone to make buying the tickets worth it).

(6) the product gives us appealing but harmful false information

• A self-help book that paints an appealing vision of the world that people WISH was true (e.g. “you can get anything you want, and you don’t even have to try! It will come to you automatically if you just believe!”), but the book is actually filled with terrible advice that will cause your life to be worse on average (e.g., the advice actually demotivates you from taking actions to achieve things, and the book claims that if its advice isn’t working for you, then you aren’t following it properly, so it’s your own fault).

(7) the product gives consumers benefits immediately but then causes harm in the future to those same consumers that more than makes up for the initial benefit

• A loan product that gives cash immediately, but which has skyrocketing interest rates years from now (the details of which are complex and hard to fully appreciate). People buy it because they are overemphasizing the immediate benefit relative to the greater long term future cost.

ZERO SUM OR NEGATIVE SUM GAMES

(8) the product does create value for THAT consumer, but it does so by making it easier for that consumer to take advantage of or harm other people

• Software that makes it easier for you to spam people. People buy it because they benefit selfishly by spamming people, but at a direct cost to those other people.

(9) the product provides value to you as long as you can convince others to become buyers of it too, but ultimately this is unsustainable so, in the end, someone pays the price

• Various multi-level marketing companies that turned out to be pyramid schemes, where most of the value a consumer derives is not from using the product, but rather from convincing other consumers to convince other consumers, to convince other consumers to sell the product, etc. and eventually the whole thing collapses because there isn’t enough real demand. Consumers still buy it though because they see all the (real) success stories of people getting rich from it and because their friends have a monetary incentive to convince them to, and people don’t catch on right away to the lack of sustainability of the whole system.

(10) the product helps the buyer get more of a resource that only exists in limited quantities, so it necessarily comes at the expense of someone else getting less

• A product that trains you how to do better on a specific entrance exam for a highly prestigious institution that has only a fixed number of open slots each year.

NEGATIVE EXTERNALITIES

(11) the product has negative environmental externalities that are greater than the value it provides to the purchaser

• A toy company that dumps their factory waste in a river, slowly and subtly poison people living nearby. People buy because they like the toys, but the consequence is causing other people to be poisoned.

(12) the product causes a large transfer of wealth from poorer people to richer people, leading to greater inequality

• An automation technology for private companies in a non-competitive industry that makes the service those companies provide WORSE for consumers, but it is still in the interest of companies in that industry to buy it because it allows them to fire many employees. So even though consumers are less happy and buy less overall (and a lot of people lose their jobs), the companies save so much money that they still make more profit. And furthermore, because the industry is not very competitive, the companies don’t subsequently fight each other on price and so are able to hang on to this extra profit (that they used to pay to their employees) for a long time.

(13) the product gives some people a little value, but a huge amount of time from a huge number of people went into developing that product, and it was not an effective use of that massive amount of labor.

• A bloated startup that raised way too much VC money and hired way too many employees, yet its product is only slightly useful.

The space of possible ideas is ABSURDLY, almost UNBELIEVABLY large. If we thought about a different idea every second for our entire lives, we wouldn’t begin to scratch the surface.

As a simple example, let’s consider the number of two-player competitive games played on an 8×8 chessboard, where each player starts with 16 pieces and each piece has a pre-determined fixed rule for how it moves across the board and captures other pieces. There are far more than a quintillion (i.e., 1,000,000,000,000,000,000) such games, and while many of these games are less than entertaining, there will be games in this set that are far better than chess along any dimension of gaming that you should care to consider. In other words, chess is our limited human attempt to mine a tiny corner of game space.

Of course, this type of 8×8 board game is just a tiny subset of all types of games, which is, in itself, a minuscule subset of all types of ideas.

This VASTNESS of idea space is why I find it so valuable when a person or book mentions a powerful, plausible idea that I’ve never heard before, even if no evidence is provided for why I should believe the idea.

The chance that you would independently have thought up an idea that someone tells you about is vanishingly small (even if you feel like you COULD have thought of it). The act of raising a powerful, plausible hypothesis to your awareness can be hugely valuable. Mere identification of a point in idea-space can involve a ton of work, even if it doesn’t seem like it.

Of course, we can then do our own vetting of ideas, even if the people who bring them to our attention don’t give us strong reasons to believe them. For instance, we can check them against facts that we already have strong reasons to believe. And we can ask ourselves, “does this idea contradict the evidence we have, or line up nicely with it? Does it explain things that confused us before and gel with other things we know to be true?” If we’re serious about testing the idea, we can even go out and gather new evidence about whether it’s true.

Some great ideas seem obviously true once you hear them. In fact, I’m a really big fan of trying to state the obvious; but not just any obvious things. The obvious things that people have likely not yet consciously considered. That is, what I like to call the “obvious and unsaid.” It bothers me when people dismiss obvious but rarely encountered ideas on the grounds that they seem obvious once you hear them because obviousness can be an asset rather than a liability.

These obviously true ideas can be especially valuable because they are easy to vet as being correct, yet due to the vastness of idea-space, they very easily could never have occurred to you before. So, stating obvious ideas that are rarely thought about, but which have important implications, can be an extremely efficient way to transmit value to others.

On a related point, when people say “everything’s already been done” or “there are no new ideas left,” the only way these statements could be sensible is if we interpret them as claims about humans rather than claims about ideas. For instance, as a claim that human minds are so similar to each other that, in the VAST space of possible ideas, we’re confined to a sad, well-trodden, little corner of derivative pseudo creativity.

However, I’m much more optimistic than this: while much is derivative, I think there are new ideas all over the place that we can learn to look for. As one person finds a new idea in a corner over there, and they share it over here, human knowledge advances. What’s more, I think that seeing new ideas as “derivative” is kind of missing the point.

Yes, good new ideas are often built from pieces of old ideas, but there’s nothing bad about that. Bricks are the building blocks of houses, and ideas are the building blocks of ideas.

To figure out how much we value our time we can ask ourselves simple questions, such as, “How much would I have to get paid to be willing to do an hour of work now?” The answer we give will not always be the same from day-to-day, or even from hour to hour. On vacation we might be in a mindset where we find work more unappealing, and so might require a higher pay. On the other hand, in times when we are strapped for cash, we might be willing to accept less pay. Our required monetary reward will also depend on how pleasurable or displeasurable we expect the work to be. And if we’ve just been working for five hours, we might require more pay for the next hour than we did for each of the last five.

Let’s consider how we might actually apply this concept of placing a monetary value on our time. Suppose that a store is giving out free mugs, but to get one, you have to wait for 10 minutes in line. Ask yourself, “How much money would a person have to pay me now to wait for ten minutes in that line on his behalf?” Suppose that you decide that you’d be willing to do this waiting for no less than $5. That means that if someone said they would pay you only $4.95 to stand in line for them, you’d turn down the offer. Now, ask yourself, “In the future, would I rather have $5 or one of these mugs they are handing out?” Or, similarly, try “Would I be willing to spend $5 now to buy one of these mugs?” If the answer is that you’d prefer to have $5 than a mug then it probably doesn’t make sense to wait in the line. In this case, you are assigning that 10 minutes of time waiting in line a value equivalent to $5, but the mug is worth less than that dollar amount to you. Put another way, you would be willing to wait in that line for $5, but if you did so, you wouldn’t actually want to buy the mug with the $5 you earned! It is reasonable therefore to think of the waiting in line as being more costly for you than the mug is valuable to you. On the other hand, if you’d rather have the mug than the $5, in that case it likely would make sense to wait in the line.

Incidentally, it may be important to frame the question as “Would I spend $5 to buy that mug if I could?” rather than “Would I sell that mug for $5 if I already had it?” The problem with the latter is that research has shown that we tend to be biased to prefer items that we currently possess to ones that we don’t yet have. So, if imagining owning the mug is enough to trigger this bias, the latter question could lead to distorted answers.

This technique of placing a monetary value on our time is particularly useful in situations where something is being offered for free, since people often sacrifice an unreasonably large amount to receive free items. Perhaps genuine pleasure is created just from knowing that you got something for free, which helps compensate for such sacrifices. But nonetheless, one should be cautious about overacting to the word “free”, which can certainly snag us with its large psychological appeal.

To consider another example, suppose that you’re trying to decide whether you should drive an extra 15 minutes each way to go to the cheaper grocery store rather than the pricier one (we’ll assume, in this case, that the two stores have equally good products). The question to then ask yourself is, “How much would I have to be paid to drive for a total of 30 minutes on someone else’s behalf?” If the answer is $10, then ask yourself, “How much do I expect to save by going to the cheap store?” If the answer is more than $10, then it probably makes sense to drive the extra distance. If the answer is less than $10, it probably doesn’t make sense.

Our brains are not necessarily going to make sensible decisions unless we explicitly reason using this process. For instance, one study showed that people said they were willing to drive a certain extra distance to save a small amount of money on small purchases, but not on large purchases, even when the dollar amount saved was equivalent in the two cases. If being paid $10 is worth 30 extra minutes of driving to you, it should be worth it to drive that 30 extra minutes to save $10 whether you are then going to be spending $20 or $20,000 at your destination.

When you are making a decision involving sacrificing your time, it can be well worth it to ask yourself, “How much would someone have to pay me to use my time in this way?” Then, ask yourself, “How much would I be willing to pay to be given what my sacrifice of time is getting me?” If the former is bigger than the latter, you should seriously consider not using your time in that manner.