Your comments add nothing to the discussion and only serve to spam up the comments section. Just why?

That's too harsh. traceroute66 is (presumably) offering a genuinely held opinion, and it's valuable to know that this opinion exists even if one disagrees with it. I actually thought about his point of view quite a lot today while talking a snowy walk in the woods with my dog. It's foreign to me, but I wouldn't be surprised if his approach has served him well for making progress in his career. At the least, he sounds better paid than I am.

The question I had was how far he'd suggest taking this approach. Should one avoid learning to cook because it's (currently) cheaper to pay someone for food? How does one justify hobbies? What about volunteer work? I'm sort of on the opposite end. I struggle to justify paying for anything that I can do myself. It may be that I've never felt I was in a situation where I could easily choose to make more money without suffering debilitating moral conflict.

Thank you @nkurz for taking the time to consider the alternative perspective.

I've kind of "read the room" here and its clear my perspective is not welcome (or at least "not understood" if I'm being generous on interpretation).

So I'll refrain from commenting more except on one point you raised:

> Should one avoid learning to cook because it's (currently) cheaper to pay someone for food?

Actually DIY cooking is generally cheaper than paying for it, assuming we are talking about healthy, balanced meals and not just counting anything as "food".

There are numerous things you can buy that can keep you sustained in various forms for anything up to a week whilst not incurring any additional expenditure (or at least minimal). For example you could buy a chicken, you could roast that chicken and enjoy a meal, you could then cut up the carcass and make a good few litres of stock, from that stock you could then make (at least) soup, a risotto and if you bought a decent sized chicken there is of course the possibility of some sort of cold salad out of the left-over meat. So that's (at least) four meals out of one chicken.

The labour element with cooking - at least on simple meals - does not (generally) amount to much. For example, with the chicken example above, the actual time preparing/cooking is minimal, for the bulk of the elapsed time you can walk away and do something more productive whilst the chicken does its thing in the oven or in the stock pot.

Meanwhile in a restaurant you'll pay through the nose for the same food (it's an old rule of thumb that restaurants work on 300% margin), you'll have to pay 10% service charge, and you'll (probably) get less food that is (probably) less healthy.

Take-aways are equally expensive because they are priced for convenience, and again the same (potential) questions about quantity and health.

Where I would draw a line is DIY farming. Whilst I admit that I am not familiar with the economics, I suspect for most people it would work out cheaper to buy your raw ingredients than to grow/farm them yourself.