[munificent]

This question is highly relevant to me. I recently got a small bonus at work with the interesting stipulation that I couldn't take it in cash. (Basically, they let you expense something on the company card for personal use.)

I've been getting back into making music so I wanted to spend it on something fun related to that. And this triggered a surprisingly intense amount of anxiety where I found it really hard to decide what to get. After a lot of soul searching, the understanding I reached was:

There are two flavors of happiness I'll call "joy" and "satisfaction". Joy is stuff where the act itself is intrinsically pleasurable. Taking a warm bath, eating a good dessert, a conversation with close friends. Pleasures to the senses that require no effort on your part. Satisfaction is stuff where having done the act feels good. Writing a short story. Cleaning the garage. You only get out of it what you put into it. If you've heard of "type 1 fun" and "type 2 fun", it's that same distinction. In practice, most hobbies blend the two.

There's a sort of third in-between category for activities whose joy/satisfaction ratio is skill dependent. Sitting down at a piano when you don't how to play well is almost pure satisfaction. It's uncomfortable and repetitive. It doesn't sound great. Your fingers hurt. But you feel good about making progress practicing the skill. Sitting down to play piano when you have mastered it is very enjoyable. You get to perform and it feels good seeing your body create the delightful sounds you hear in your head.

My experience is that the hobbies where people acquire the stuff but then don't use it are the ones that weight more towards satisfaction than joy, and in especially the ones that are skill-dependent. YouTube makes the latter particularly failure prone because there are infinite videos of people who have mastered skills that make the hobby look like pure joy.

(For me, the realization was that since I wanted to maximize joy, I should get gear that built on my existing music skills instead of requiring me to learn more to get fun out of it. I got a little MIDI keyboard and a looper pedal since I already know how to make music on a computer and play a little guitar and those make that existing skill more rewarding.)

[X6S1x6Okd1st]

>This question is highly relevant to me. I recently got a small bonus at work with the interesting stipulation that I couldn't take it in cash. (Basically, they let you expense something on the company card for personal use.)

That sounds like tax evasion

[munificent]

You do still file an expense report so I feel confident that it's on the up-and-up for tax purposes. The docs said they did research and people got a greater sense of reward from bonuses like this instead of just having the number in the next direct-deposited paycheck be slightly larger.

Anecdotally, it certainly made a larger emotional impression on me. I had gotten a similar cash bonus a while back that I intended to also use for music stuff and basically procrastinated figuring out what to get until I forgot about it entirely. This time I actually got something and then sent a nice email to the person I got the bonus from thanking them.

It's been a really nice experience.

[X6S1x6Okd1st]

I've understood expense reports to be buisness expenses that were first paid for by the employee and the employer compensates them for it. In that case it's not taxed as income as it was never really anything the employee "got".

It all depends on how your company accountants do it, they could be doing something unusual, but the way you've described it sounds like tax evasion.

I dont really care, but if you like the benefit you may not want to bring it up in public forums.

[metafunk]

> Basically, they let you expense something on the company card for personal use.

Gold bullion.