[zookatron]

I suppose the real question is then "How do we decide what is 'worth doing' ourselves?"

I think it's fair to say that abolishing all division of labor doesn't make much sense. So what makes some activities different such that they should not be subject to division of labor? Outsourcing work to personal trainers, doctors, and musicians seems like a very good idea to me.

[meric]

Let's say you got a date with a girl. Instead of a date you could have been programming making $100 per hour instead. The date costs you money. Would you outsource the date to your friend who will go in your stead with the girl, so you can be more productive?

No way, the date is worth going in and of itself.

Same logic with raising children.

You're going to to look back on the experience with nothing but fondness. The experience of raising your child was valuable in and of itself.

Life is not about maximising productivity, you know.

[zookatron]

I don't think your example of dating is a very good one. You're changing the functional nature of the date by having someone else go on it. That's like saying you can't outsource hair-cutting to a barber because it would be equivalent of telling your friend to go cut his hair for you. Clearly you need to be participatory in some degree for the activity to retain it's functionality, but that doesn't mean you can't outsource the hard parts to someone else and have everyone be better off. (Maybe it's unrealistic, but personally I think we do need a bit more outsourcing in dating. We don't need to have everyone muddle through it by themselves, we can have skilled people help educate and guide us in how to find healthy meaningful relationships.)

And honestly, I simply can't help disagreeing with the idea that everyone should raise children themselves, just because we will "look back on it with fondness". That seems to me to be the equivalent of saying (pardon the awful analogy) that people should kidnap women off the street and rape them because they find the experience "pleasurable". The way I see it is that by raising a child you are forcing your will upon them, they did not ask or consent to it and have no say in how it is done. And yet, child raising must be done somehow, and therefore you have a serious responsibility to try to ensure that it is done as well as it possibly can. You have no right to force poor parenting onto a child simply because you had a "nice experience".

I realize my views on this may be a bit unusual, but I think it's worth considering.

[goldbrick]

Do you have kids? I would hardly say every parent I know looks back on it with "nothing but fondness". Some would even say that on balance, they would have rather not had children at all.

[meric]

I should have rephrased it to include only people who enjoy raising children. For those people, it's OK not to be maximally productive. It's ok to not want to outsource raising a child by strangers.

[RangerScience]

I think there's two branches:

1) Things you do because you love doing them. Like spending time with your kids - it's not about doing it as-best-as-is-possible, it's just about doing it because you love doing it. It's worth doing for you, so you don't have to worry about how well you do it.

2) Things that are outcome-based. When it doesn't matter if you're the right person for the job because you're the ONLY person for the job and the job needs doing.

[Avshalom]

>I suppose the real question is then "How do we decide what is 'worth doing' ourselves?"

Well that's the thing, Chesterton gives advice on that in the quote:

Is it worth doing even if you're doing it poorly? Then it's 'worth doing'. Is it only worth doing if you're doing it at a high/professional/competitive level? Then it's not 'worth doing'.

Of course as pointed out in every third comment, take Chesterton with a grain of salt. Chesterton never said anything that he didn't later contradict, and assert that contradicting himself was in fact proof of the ultimate correctness of both statements.

[mooreds]

> "How do we decide what is 'worth doing' ourselves?"

Another way to phrase this: "How do we live a good life?" People have been asking this for thousands of years. It's one of (or perhaps the?) central question of humanity.