Why I Don’t Let Women Pay Me For Sex

Your stomach grumbles.

You and your tribe on the African savannah have struggled to find food for days. The men have helplessly chased wild deer and the women have scoured for nuts and berries. You’ve got nothing to show for it but sore legs and tired eyes. Everyone is miserable. Everyone, that is, except for Steve.

While the rest of the tribe worked, Steve lazily lounged around. Sure, he pretended to be hunting here and there, but as soon as the leaders would stop watching him, he’d go back to sweeping for mines or playing solitaire.

The result? As the rest of the tribe withered and died, starved for calories, Steve managed to hang on long enough to leech on to a neighboring tribe passing by. He met a beautiful cavewoman and spawned piles of cavebabies.

Luckily, we’ve come a long way from Steve’s world. A successful life today consists of so much more than survival: doing interesting things, having the freedom to explore, making an impact on the world. In fact, a modern Steve would have no problem signing up for welfare and lazily surviving to a ripe old age.

But Steve still exists in our biology somewhere. We all still have an underlying feeling that the less we can get away with doing, the better.

How does our brain balance these two seemingly conflicting ideas? By building a wall between our internal and external rewards. When we imagine we’re doing something for it’s own sake, we allow ourselves to take pleasure in working on it – and often even sacrifice for the opportunity. You know you’re never going to become a rock star, yet you still love creating music. In fact, I’ll take it a step further.

You don’t love making music despite having no hope of being a rock star. You love making music because you have no hope of being a rock star.

But when we classify the reasons for doing something as external, our brain treats things very differently. Now, we will do whatever we can to do as little as possible, effectively increasing our return on investment. We don’t stop to consider whether this specific “investment” is really something we should be trying to minimize. Instead of allowing our internal and external rewards to intermingle – creating activities that foster both – our brain puts up a barrier between them.

Imagine your neighbor asks you to spend the day helping him move. You’re not great friends with him but he’s always been a nice enough guy and you’ve got nothing so important to do. Why not?

Now imagine the same situation. Your neighbor asks you to spend the day helping him move. This time, he’s willing to pay you $5.

Five dollars!? For a whole day of manual labor? You’re kidding me.

Notice what happened. The second scenario is indisputably better than the first. Five bucks may not be adequate compensation, but isn’t it better than nothing? No… it’s not. As it’s explained in behavioral economics, market norms push out social norms. The internal, positive feelings associated with the first scenario are killed by adding money to the equation.

Our brains don’t add up the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards of an action – they choose one or the other.

This is the problem with externally validating things that should be based on an internal drive. Being paid to do a job makes us want to finish as quickly and lazily as we can get away with. Getting grades to validate our education encourages us to earn our As with as little effort as possible. It doesn’t take long to lose sight of the internal motivation for working and learning.

This doesn’t exactly make sense. If I would enjoy learning about a topic without grades, how can being graded change my perception? Isn’t it just that school focuses too much on things I’m not interested in? Are my intrinsic preferences really so weak?

School’s curriculum selection might exaggerate the problem, but it isn’t the cause of it. What makes all this possible if the fact that we don’t know our own intrinsic preferences nearly as well as we expect. Our preferences are much more malleable than we think.

Dan Ariely loves this. In one experiment, he divided students into two groups. The first group was asked whether they would accept $10 to listen to Ariely recite poetry. The rest were asked whether they would pay $10 for the privilege of listening to his poetry recital. When, eventually, he did a poetry reading for the class for free, the students who were told that listening had value stayed longer and rated the class as more enjoyable. Whether we like it or not, we base out opinions of things heavily on our perceptions of what we’re supposed to think. This is why social proof plays such a huge role in human interactions.

Ariely must have taken his inspiration from the trickster Tom Sawyer.

[Ben, a neighborhood boy] “Say — I’m going in a-swimming, I am. Don’t you wish you could? But of course you’d druther WORK — wouldn’t you? Course you would!”

Tom contemplated the boy a bit, and said: “What do you call work?”

“Why, ain’t THAT work?” … ”Oh come, now, you don’t mean to let on that you LIKE it?” …

“Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?”

That put the thing in a new light. Ben stopped nibbling his apple. Tom swept his brush daintily back and forth — stepped back to note the effect — added a touch here and there — criticised the effect again — Ben watching every move and getting more and more interested, more and more absorbed. Presently he said “Say, Tom, let ME whitewash a little.”

Tom Sawyer knew that what we consider intrinsically rewarding is largely based on context. The other boy had a clear distinction in his mind between work (which is done for extrinsic rewards) and play (which is done for the play itself). Fence painting is a chore! By removing all extrinsic rewards, Sawyer encouraged his naive victim to realize the intrinsic joys that fence painting could provide.

This is why Leo Babauta is so fixated on goallessness. Goals are focused on the external. It’s about getting there. By setting extrinsic goals for ourselves, we seem to strip ourselves of the intrinsic enjoyment of the journey to get there.

But there’s a better solution than giving up goals.

A long-term, goal-oriented view is necessary for proper strategic thinking. To drop this view in exchange for psychological well-being is self-sabotage. On the other hand, being miserable while achieving our goals defeats their purpose, as all goals serve the greater goal of happiness. Instead of choosing a side in the war between intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, why not find a way to combine them?

The key to doing this is to focus on the joys of each activity without rewards first. In many cases, this will involve actually removing extrinsic rewards and doing it purely out of enjoyment before even thinking about what gains it could provide. In other situations, actively meditating on the fact that you would appreciate the activity without rewards is enough. Train your mind to think of each thing you do as a treat. Appreciate the intrinsic pleasure it brings you. And – most importantly – don’t forget to continuously remind yourself that your love of each activity is why you are doing it. This shouldn’t be self-deception – it should be the truth. This is your life and all the external rewards in the world won’t bring you happiness. That comes from within. The extrinsic rewards really are just a side benefit.

Reading is work for a student. Playing an instrument is work for a musician. Having sex is work for a prostitute. I’ve been working so hard, they might whine after hours of their respective tasks.

The next time I spend a day reading, playing guitar, and having sex, remind me not to worry about the paycheck.