The other day I was walking to pick up some lunch instead of having it delivered. I also had the opportunity to freelance for $100/hr (not always available to me), but I still chose to walk and save myself the delivery fee.

I make similarly irrational decisions about money all the time. There are situations where I feel like other mundane tasks should be outsourced. Eg. I should trade my money for time, and then use that time to make even more money. But I can't bring myself to do it.

Perhaps food is a good example. It often takes me 1-2 hours to "do" dinner. Suppose ordering something saves me $10 relative to what I'd otherwise spend at home. I think my time is worth more than $5-10/hr, and yet I don't order food.

One possible explanation is that I rarely have the opportunity to make extra money with extra free time, eg. by freelancing. But I could work on startups in that free time. That doesn't guarantee me more money, but in terms of expected value, I think it's pretty high. Is there a reason why this type of thinking might be wrong? Variance? I could adjust the utilities based off of some temporal discounting and diminishing marginal utility or whatever, but even after that the EV seems wildly higher than the $5-10/hr I'm saving by cooking.

Here's the other thing: I'm not alone. In fact, I observe that tons and tons of people are in a similar position as me, where they could be trading money for time very profitably but choose not to, especially here on LessWrong.

I wonder whether there is something I am missing. I wonder what is going on here.