My cheerful price is sensitive, valuable information, and I won’t give it out to just anybody.
Wait, what? That sounds less than cheerful to me. My cheerful price is quite high for random tasks from strangers—on the order of $10K/day for non-dangerous, non-reputation-impacting work. I suspect there aren’t many cases where someone would want to pay it, but it’s neither sensitive nor valuable information. And of course, it’s lower for some tasks, for some people, on some days (and much higher for some).
Some confusion may be coming in the (unstated) assumption that one’s cheerful price is a fixed amount. It’s not—it’s highly contextual—it depends on what else one has going on, what expected secondary (monetary or non-) costs or rewards might accrue, relationship effects if it’s among people I expect to meet again, etc.
Honestly, for me, in the financial situation I’m currently in, the concept of “cheerful price” isn’t very useful. My decision-making and happiness is far more impacted by non-monetary factors than payments among non-professional interactions. It’s a cute theory, but I expect there’s not a lot of value in codifying it very completely.
This post was written after the first time I was asked my cheerful price for a certain activity. I noticed that I didn’t have a very cheerful time thinking about what that price would be. I wanted to think more about why. For a piece of work with loosely specified requirements, you might have many “cheerful prices” depending on those requirements. Pinning them down and establishing what those cheerful prices would be, when you don’t actually think it’s very likely that the person asking will agree to your cheerful price, is not very cheerful work. So to make me feel cheerful, you’d really need to make me feel a sense of trust that you’re serious about your offer of a cheerful price.
Absent trust between friends, you can do that with money, by offering to pay me to work out the specs and price for a piece of work.
The concept of a “cheerful price” might be best used in a context of friendship, where the work is easy to explain and aimed at a person who you suspect is happy to at least consider it. But the first time I was asked my “cheerful price” wasn’t in that context, and so I wanted to consider the way you’d think about it outside that context.
Wait, what? That sounds less than cheerful to me. My cheerful price is quite high for random tasks from strangers—on the order of $10K/day for non-dangerous, non-reputation-impacting work. I suspect there aren’t many cases where someone would want to pay it, but it’s neither sensitive nor valuable information. And of course, it’s lower for some tasks, for some people, on some days (and much higher for some).
Some confusion may be coming in the (unstated) assumption that one’s cheerful price is a fixed amount. It’s not—it’s highly contextual—it depends on what else one has going on, what expected secondary (monetary or non-) costs or rewards might accrue, relationship effects if it’s among people I expect to meet again, etc.
Honestly, for me, in the financial situation I’m currently in, the concept of “cheerful price” isn’t very useful. My decision-making and happiness is far more impacted by non-monetary factors than payments among non-professional interactions. It’s a cute theory, but I expect there’s not a lot of value in codifying it very completely.
This post was written after the first time I was asked my cheerful price for a certain activity. I noticed that I didn’t have a very cheerful time thinking about what that price would be. I wanted to think more about why. For a piece of work with loosely specified requirements, you might have many “cheerful prices” depending on those requirements. Pinning them down and establishing what those cheerful prices would be, when you don’t actually think it’s very likely that the person asking will agree to your cheerful price, is not very cheerful work. So to make me feel cheerful, you’d really need to make me feel a sense of trust that you’re serious about your offer of a cheerful price.
Absent trust between friends, you can do that with money, by offering to pay me to work out the specs and price for a piece of work.
The concept of a “cheerful price” might be best used in a context of friendship, where the work is easy to explain and aimed at a person who you suspect is happy to at least consider it. But the first time I was asked my “cheerful price” wasn’t in that context, and so I wanted to consider the way you’d think about it outside that context.