I think the hard part is that cooking and cleaning (some items) can be done while effectively multi-tasking, chatting about someone's day or collecting one's thoughts. I have a young daughter and when I put something in the microwave, cut up vegetables, fetch spices, or load the dishwasher, we can generally keep the conversation and activity going. Cooking or baking something from scratch is obviously much more time-intensive. Getting food delivered doesn't really save that much time. However, cleaning the bathroom or vacuuming are generally blocking activities and thus easier to rationalize outsourcing. I would agree that we as humans have a very hard time valuing our present and future time, so I would always love to have sometime critique my day. "Hey, you enjoy your job at tech company X enough for the next two years, so it seems like you can afford a laundry service for the next 10 years, time which you can spend more at playgrounds and working out, why don't you do it?"
Re:India has a hole where its middle class should be
by nshelly on Monday January 15, 2018 @03:21PM
(#16153082)
Good point. But the person getting an extra $10,000 a day for losing an hour of sleep every day would need financial discipline (harder when we don't sleep) not to bump up their expenditures otherwise it would just set themselves up trading health for short term financial gain. It's very difficult to just snap your fingers when you're wealthy and overweight with blood pressure issues in your 40's and 50's to get back to and maintain a normal BMI for the rest of your life.
Cooking is the same thing. I could almost certainly earn an extra $15 each night driving Uber for an hour, instead of going home to my family. The fact that I don't do that puts a lower bound of $15 on how much I value that hour. If I'm forced to do some chore during that hour instead, like cooking or cleaning dishes, you have to account for the $15 in lost value of free time.