I don’t know what my time and effort are worth. If you ask my job, it’s $31.53 an hour and one-and-a-half times that after forty hours in a single week. If you look at my gaming time, it’s probably not worth a whole lot considering how much time I spend on Final Fantasy 14 and how little I pay for it (each hour equates to about seventeen cents spent, by my calculations). If you look into my game files, my time is probably worth an average of eight hundred thousand gil (Final Fantasy’s in-game currency) since that’s about what I make when I’m actively working on stuff. On average, anyway. I tend to do a lot of work in that game that doesn’t ever get paid out for anything. Making gear and consumables for friends, providing materials and consumables to my Free Company, organizing things, etc. So when someone asks me to make something where the material cost is neglible and wants to pay me “for my time,” I don’t really have a good answer for them. What is my time worth? Not a lot, sometimes. Quite a lot other times. And I usually don’t know which of those is true until I’ve picked the wrong one and am upset about it. Probably because I keep picking “not a lot” and yet I somehow still feel ill-used or taken for granted a lot. Not just in Final Fantasy 14, either. At my job, with the friends I hardly see any more, and even in some of my non-video-game-but-still-digital social activities. It would probably go a long way to resolving those feelings if I could get that particular question worked out in some way, if I could figure out what my time is worth, since I’m spending it so freely and… well, unjudiciously at the moment. I really need to get past my reflexive “Sure! Let’s make it happen!” response when it comes to people asking things of me and actually take a moment to check in with myself about how I’m feeling before I answer.