You are using utility in the economic sense and not in the decision theorethic sense. If you frame it as “duty” vs “play” it becomes way more understandable.
A utility that you explicitly calculate on a paper can feel like an outside force that forces you to do something. Something that you have internalised as part of your soul and who you are is more just self-expression. While the concept of utility has been used to refer to both it only really ablies to the latter (for example when you turn preferences into ordinal numerical values). A agent not seeing that work has utility isn’t in any way contradictory or paradoxical. If you keep your concept more stringent there is a step from going from dollar production into utility. If dollar production isn’t the main utlity component then it is not surprising that there is a disconnect with them. This might have the same structure as the question of “free will” as you do not feel that it is your person doing the activity when it is your “employee” doing it as part of your job duties, that is in a sense you are doing “unvoluntary work” (while simultaneusly thinking that if you didn’t like your job you would quit, in a sense also believing in voluntary working). It is easier to stop play if you feel like it but doing a similiar decision not to work today as you don’t feel like it is a more responcibility calling enterpreneour level decision that can require doing things that might be in conflict with work ethics (or it calls in a more holistic “employee thriving” advanced management theory). It is somewhat popular to hold a stance that you need to work even if you some particular day you don’t feel like it.
There is also a well known effect where two groups were given a puzzle and one group was given monetary rewards for completing it and the other wasn’t. When afterwards they were given free access to the puzzle those that were not rewarded engaged with it and those that were rewarded did not. I believe the associated theory is about how explcit external rewards destroy intrinsic motivation. It could also be termed how a job were you normally get 10$ for doing you now get 0$ is clearly not worth the effort, the rewarded people tended to evalaute the gain by monetary terms.
You might be doing a somewhat reverse process. Because it generates money it can’t be fun because work by definition isn’t play.
You are using utility in the economic sense and not in the decision theorethic sense. If you frame it as “duty” vs “play” it becomes way more understandable.
A utility that you explicitly calculate on a paper can feel like an outside force that forces you to do something. Something that you have internalised as part of your soul and who you are is more just self-expression. While the concept of utility has been used to refer to both it only really ablies to the latter (for example when you turn preferences into ordinal numerical values). A agent not seeing that work has utility isn’t in any way contradictory or paradoxical. If you keep your concept more stringent there is a step from going from dollar production into utility. If dollar production isn’t the main utlity component then it is not surprising that there is a disconnect with them. This might have the same structure as the question of “free will” as you do not feel that it is your person doing the activity when it is your “employee” doing it as part of your job duties, that is in a sense you are doing “unvoluntary work” (while simultaneusly thinking that if you didn’t like your job you would quit, in a sense also believing in voluntary working). It is easier to stop play if you feel like it but doing a similiar decision not to work today as you don’t feel like it is a more responcibility calling enterpreneour level decision that can require doing things that might be in conflict with work ethics (or it calls in a more holistic “employee thriving” advanced management theory). It is somewhat popular to hold a stance that you need to work even if you some particular day you don’t feel like it.
There is also a well known effect where two groups were given a puzzle and one group was given monetary rewards for completing it and the other wasn’t. When afterwards they were given free access to the puzzle those that were not rewarded engaged with it and those that were rewarded did not. I believe the associated theory is about how explcit external rewards destroy intrinsic motivation. It could also be termed how a job were you normally get 10$ for doing you now get 0$ is clearly not worth the effort, the rewarded people tended to evalaute the gain by monetary terms.
You might be doing a somewhat reverse process. Because it generates money it can’t be fun because work by definition isn’t play.