And here we come to the third important aspect of our topic — choice. Human nature is such that we act through choice. The benchmark for choice is the value each of us assigns to one goal or another. Moreover, as we have seen, these values change at every moment of human life, under the influence of circumstances, experience, and other people. Each of us has a certain scale of values, arranged in order of importance. To choose means to refuse, means to sacrifice one value in favor of another. The lawyers from the example at the beginning of this note refused payment because they valued the satisfaction of providing free assistance more than the small sum of money offered to them (let us recall Zhvanetsky: “Can you bury without the deceased?” “You can, although it is humiliating”). There is nothing “non-economic” about their behavior — on the contrary, it clearly demonstrates the workings of basic economic laws.
Now let us return to our work and the question of why we work. As we can see, the essence of this occupation is that we refuse what we could be doing if we did not “go to work,” in favor of the benefits we can obtain by working. Understanding this fact — which only seems simple at first glance — greatly facilitates life. It is not at all necessary to become a saintly hermit on the Brahmaputra, to attend various “personal growth seminars,” or to torment oneself in other sophisticated ways. It is enough to understand what you really want and to stick to your desires. The author of these lines, for example, gave up office work many years ago. Working in an office — that is, “going to work” — I would earn considerably more money. However, the benefits I could get with that money seem less valuable to me than those I receive by staying home. The opportunity to sleep in mornings and read smart books is worth more to me than Friday drinking sessions with colleagues and vacations in Turkey.
The notion that “we work for money” is fundamentally different from what actually happens in life. “Career,” “success,” and the accompanying rat race are just one of many possible goals that people can choose, at the cost of giving up other goals. Career, success, and rat race by no means follow from “economic theory” and are neither a mandatory nor even a desirable line of behavior.