what did you do for free

Alain De Vos

Alain De Vos

Personally i know persons and they work in an elderly home. They do it for free.
Maybe you can contribute to the freebsd kernel or ports and it for free.
No money, but it can make you feel better in life.
What's yours.
 
Alain De Vos
What are motivations for „working for free“? Take your time to think about it. Try to give general answers to yourself. Write it down. Look at it!

Next day ask yourself what are my own personal motivations. Try to be as much honest to yourself, as much as you can. Do not cheat yourself at this stage, because you might get enlightened by the sense that it’s not the others who need to be helped.

If I’m going to help others, I need to be able doing so. I need capabilities for serving others, otherwise I’ll might become a burden to others, and experience another personal failing. Can I?

Am I a responsible person? Do I take responsibility for my doing? Can other relay on me? Is my contribution sustainable?

Try to identify what your personal needs really are. Pretended altruism is no altruism.

If I have a need for feeling better, I should be very clear about, what does drive me, my thinking, my behavior. What does make me needing this, what am I missing? Am I going to use others for getting a selfish better feeling? Am I trying to compensate my deficits, loneliness, fishing for acceptance, attention?

Another important thing is, you must be able to afford working for free. If you cannot afford taking no money, you may add to your problems another one, worsening your material situation. Do not pretend that you can afford working for free. That’s not going to enable a sustainable better feeling. Concede „I need financial compensation for my work“ if that is the case. Better spend your time finding a paid job. Self-exploitation might end sooner or later in a veritable burnout.
 
fmc000 said:
Torvalds is a multimillionaire. It's probably easier doing things for free when you don't have to worry about money.
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I think he wrote that book before being a multimillionaire. Didn't know he's $150m worth now.

Nobody does nothing for "free". Everybody is looking for something. The satisfaction of getting something done can be a strong motivator.
 
rbranco said:
I think he wrote that book before being a multimillionaire. Didn't know he's $150m worth now.

Nobody does nothing for "free". Everybody is looking for something. The satisfaction of getting something done can be a strong motivator.
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I think he became a multimillionaire when Red Hat went public. They gifted him 20M in stocks. It was 26 years ago.
 
rbranco said:
Nobody does nothing for "free".
Click to expand...
This is true most of the times but generally this sentence is wrong, as it happens all the time that people do act for free, in pure altruism. Say you are on a walk and you find a situation where you can save a life without endangering yourself. Do you say "give me money or I let you die?"
 
POSIX.1 said:
This is true most of the times but generally this sentence is wrong, as it happens all the time that people do act for free, in pure altruism. Say you are on a walk and you find a situation where you can save a life without endangering yourself. Do you say "give me money or I let you die?"
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In that case you're saving your soul and winning karma points.
 
rbranco said:
I think he wrote that book before being a multimillionaire. Didn't know he's $150m worth now.

Nobody does nothing for "free". Everybody is looking for something. The satisfaction of getting something done can be a strong motivator.
Click to expand...
You come into the world with nothing, and you leave it with nothing. The best things in life are free... :)

Which is more valuable? Linus's $150 million, or a butterfly's wing?

1752763038229.png


Perhaps one day your heart can be weighed against the weight of a feather...

1752762973124.png
 
rbranco said:
If you gaze long into science, science also gazes into you.
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Yoda said that about the dark side. Maybe they need to tell some folks... :)

1752759265642.png


Perhaps some looked too deeply into the palantir... Grothendieck was one among many, over the centuries and millennia...

www.theguardian.com

‘He was in mystic delirium’: was this hermit mathematician a forgotten genius whose ideas could transform AI – or a lonely madman?

In isolation, Alexander Grothendieck seemed to have lost touch with reality, but some say his metaphysical theories could contain wonders
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

The Desert Fathers fought monsters too ...

en.wikipedia.org

Desert Fathers - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

How long now, to the Singularity... consume you, it will...
 
The title doesn't match the first post. The wording of the title is a bit offputting, but the example is about volunteering, specifically for a community that is often forgotten.
Doing something like that often gives one a deep satisfaction, makes one feel good for at least an hour (then they watch the news).
Stopping and talking with the invisible people in life; the individual in a wheelchair (they are often ignored as people talk to others with them), the person with Down's bagging groceries. It may mean nothing to you but the world to them.
The world needs a little more actual human "normal" interaction
 
blackbird9 said:
Which is more valuable? Linus's $150 million, or a butterfly's wing?
Click to expand...
Basic economics. Supply and demand. Quite easy to obtain a butterfly wing, so its value remains low. But to obtain one of Linus's arms... Or even perhaps a coding finger...

To the OP. I guess I have done loads of random stuff for free (and maintain a smattering of *BSD ports). Not much of it was for any personal gain. Mainly due to lack of direction but I suppose curiosity counts.

Its completely orthogonal to my area of expertise but I have always planned for a retirement project to implement some kind of database / accounts system for i.e a dog charity. That would be kinda cool. Not just for the dogs but also to inevitably screw over (undercut via $0) Oracle who would likely have been their vendor in the UK haha.
 
I have read, and I have found it to be true in my own life, that when you are sad, helping someone else can make you happier. So, an altruistic act can have a subtle, or maybe not so subtle, benefit to you. I sometimes think, and this is not a joke, If I do X will it brighten my wife's day? and if the answer is yes, I will do it. And, it doesn't have to be my wife, it might be a friend, or even if I do something like pick up a box that someone knocked down at Trader Joe's. But, I don't have to think of everything as a plus or minus,
sometimes I do something just because I feel it is a good thing to do. And I suspect most of us are like that, and, most of us feel good about ourselves if we help someone, whether they be stranger or family member.

Someone was once asked if they'd die for someone and answered yes, if it were one of their children or two of their cousins--something like that, trying to put it in very cynical terms, that they'd only give their life if it was to protect someone who would carry on their genes. But I suspect that most of us aren't quite so cynical when push comes to shove, up to a point, anyway. That is, most of us probably don't give money to an unhoused person begging on the street, in normal circumstances but we would probably risk ourselves to get them out of a burning building.

I think humans are both better and worse than we think they are.
 
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