The Money/Time fallacy

All of this assumes I can go to paid work an ever-increasing amount, which is obviously not true. The amount of hours I can work in a week is fixed.

That is indeed the biggest fallacy I ultimately saw in me, friends and comments regarding this issue.

I think (as the user 'grecy' mentioned in another place) that as a population, programmers are in a relatively unique position. They (we) can be in a situation where there are a lot of clear opportunities to make more money given more time investment (that can't be simply said for a coroner or a florist for example) AND having it being a lot of money. Couple that with that that it's true from a relatively young age (out of college) and it gives you some pretty interesting (blessed) challenges.

Distraction is the real cost of a car breakdown: missing a meeting, finding a mechanic, bringing the car in, answering the mechanics phone calls, picking the car up according to the mechanic's hours, etc. Repair bill? Lost in the noise. If you're really optimizing, you live walking distance from the office to avoid distracting risks like this.

One reason to consider fixing the car yourself is to accomplish a fully engaging distraction as a break from work, the sort of thing that can lead to creative breakthroughs. If you can schedule it at the right time.

The first is that all valuable things can be measured in terms of other valuable things--including dollars. Opportunity cost tradeoffs of all types can be mapped onto a tradeoff for some quantity of dollars. All things can therefore be measured in dollars, even if you want to be silly and peg the value of things like "true love" as infinite--that's equivalent to infinity dollars. Your time is measurable in money as well.

The second point follows from something either you or someone else noted before. Eventually, paying for things that aren't worth your times adds up, and you have to work more yourself. That's the point! If you can earn more in an hour at work than you would have "earned" by spending an hour painting your house, you make money at no additional expense of time or effort. Alternatively, you could make the same amount of money as you would have gained in house/aesthetic value from painting the house, but spend less time doing it since you are more efficient at work: a time savings. Now, it isn't easy to just "work an extra hour" and get paid for it, but if you make these decisions constantly and trade more time at your job for paying other people to do stuff that isn't worth your time, you'll amass enough saved time to increase your work schedule by a reasonable block.

The key to understanding all of this is that you want to say that the concept of opportunity cost extends beyond money, which it does in a sense--but in another, since all things can be measured in terms of all other things, all opportunity costs have equivalent dollar costs. And so knowing your personal per-hour opportunity cost in dollars is a great way to get a basic quantitative idea of what things are worth your time. If spending an hour with your family is worth more than the $33.74 an hour equivalent that you make at work, it doesn't mean that spending time with your family can't be quantified in terms of dollars; it means that it's worth more than an extra $33.74 but is otherwise difficult to quantify.

And curiously, let's say you reduce your working hours down to 30 a week, the bare minimum you can have to live modestly but comfortably, and spend all the extra time with your family since you love them so much. But why not reduce the hours to 29 a week? Losing that $33.74 every week would put you below the threshold that everyone is happy at. That means that now, $33.74 is worth more than spending the extra hour with your family. In essence, this example shows that the fact that people go to work at all demonstrates how dollar values can outweigh "immeasurable" things like sentimental values, and since they can outweigh, they can be compared, which means that sentimental values have a relative value to marginal dollar value increases or decreases. Therefore, sentimental values can be translated to dollar values. This is a specific case of the general principle noted before, that all things can be measured in dollars, and so it's no sin (and in fact quite handy) to use your dollar/hour opportunity cost liberally when making decisions on how to spend your time.