People who attach dollar signs to their time — or “value time like money” — tend to be overwhelmingly less happy than those who don’t, because their nonworking

People who attach dollar signs to their time — or “value time like money” — tend to be overwhelmingly less happy than those who don’t, because their nonworking hours suddenly seem less important. “Free” time gets tainted with guilt because there’s a cost associated with it. Could this be a result of people not attaching a high enough dollar amount to their time? I tend to see consulting (described as "freelancing" in the article) as exchanging a little bit of work time for a lot of play time. It just plain pays so much compared to a salaried gig that you can buy yourself the better part of a year of downtime with just a few months' work. So yes, the article is right that I did sometimes think of time in terms of money and vice versa. But usually in terms of "how many seconds would I need to work to afford this cheeseburger", rather than the article's anxiety about how much my vacation is costing me. Downtime/vacation is the explicit goal of the exercise.