I think this is a natural thing. We're wired to want to be in communities, and contribute to a communal pool, while taking as little as possible from it. There'

I think this is a natural thing. We're wired to want to be in communities, and contribute to a communal pool, while taking as little as possible from it. There's probably an evolutionary reason for that, but it gets exploited by society. What we're doing now (trading labor for money) isn't natural, but it's how it is. I remember a business seminar where a guy said he repairs sofas but had trouble treating it as a business. So the speaker asked him, what happens when they don't repair the sofas? They throw it away and buy a new one. How many people know that sofas could be repaired? Not very many. And so if he didn't advertise his services and didn't charge, people would be wasting their money throwing away perfectly good sofas. Most work we do is like that - if you didn't do the work and charge for it, the alternative is much worse. Before I joined my past few projects, the codebase was a complete mess, rigid, unable to add new features. One of my clients said that if he knew I was on the market, he'd have paid obscene rates to hire one person like me, instead of some overpriced overseas team that got nothing done. What works for me is finding clients who insist I take the damn money. One client insisted on paying 8 hours for a 2 hour in-person meeting, something about the rest of the day not being productive for me. Be generous. Some will exploit that. Don't work for them. Some will be even more generous in response. Work for those people.