A Man Who Flies Around the World for Free

>spending very little

you are spending a lot of valuable time

Anyone else find this "hobby" somewhere between low-grade morally questionable and a completely banal use of above-average problem-solving skills? Upper middle class man-children with disposable income can, I'm sure you're surprised to find out, game overenthusiastic corporate behemoths?

> Sure you can get some free stuff, but at what price? What if you took that time and invested it in bettering your skill sets, etc.?

This sort of sentence is extremely annoying to me. I'm good at several things, one of which is a video game that I've played for most of my life, so I've heard people say things like this for a good portion of my existence and it's up there with some of my biggest pet peeves. I've noticed that when people say this, it's usually a skillset that bothers them on some level, and usually for reasons that are unconscious to the person saying it.

No one says "you could spend more time developing a valuable skillset" to me regarding, say, fitness, because most people would enjoy having better bodies and the reasons for this are immediately apparent. But they'll say this regarding a few video games I am extremely good at, even though the results of having a better body and being really good at a video game are both satisfaction on my end. You might say that fitness leads to better health, but that's still using the assumption that health maximizes enjoyment in some way by extending the number of years you're alive -- because no one would be parading health as a virtue if every year alive were miserable.

I'm sure the reasons differ, but the mentality is always the same: this thing I derive obvious satisfaction from is objectively good ("bettering myself"), while this thing I can't see obvious satisfaction from (or are threatened by) is a waste of time, even if both, extended to their ultimate goal, just result in more satisfaction. It ignores that our skillsets have the same extensional goal: things we value. When you extend the purpose of your skillsets, you're always going to end up with some sense of "I value this thing."

Example: a lot of guys will improve their skillsets so they can get money so they can have lots of sex with women they find really attractive. But if you're already able to do that, and that's your primary motivation for doing that, then you're not going to have as much of an incentive to develop that skillset. Conversely, if the skillset is intrinsically satisfying to you, you'll eschew sex and develop it. But the goal is the same thing: maximizing your own utility from what you value.

You'd better a skillset, in other words, to derive more satisfaction. And since you don't know that they don't already have a developed skillset, since lots of people are good at many things, you don't know how much satisfaction they already derive from their existing skillsets. So you're just saying "you should better yourself" in a vacuum, which is effectively telling them that they could be deriving more satisfaction arbitrarily, even if they're already deriving lots of satisfaction.

So either this ignores that you'd do these things for more satisfaction anyway, or presumes that you can tell a person you've never met how much they're going to get (or should be getting) satisfaction from utilization of their skillsets, which is insanely presumptuous.

Flying business class is less unpleasant than flying regular class. But it's not pleasant.

I get that some people might like this. I was speaking to my other half about it last night. People go on about how great first class is. I wondered if people had a choice between teleportation and first class which would they choose? I'd go for teleporting. I think most would.

So how great can first class be if I'd willingly exchange it for just the time back?

Sure, but since we don't have teleportation, first class is still arguably the more enjoyable way to cross an ocean right now (save for private jets).