Tickled by 's notion of "cheerful price", as in ~"At what price would you happily X without expending any social capital, feeling instinctively 'yay' about it, without any subtle feeling of imposition?"
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I don't quite feel comfortable with it in a casual context as proposed ("do my laundry"): I think the "conversion rate" between friendship capital and dollars is difficult to pinpoint and can subtly shift into resentment in hindsight.
But I like it for professional requests!
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For instance, I often feel pretty uncomfortable asking friends who freelance to pitch in on a project, since I worry it'll end up feeling like an imposition. But I feel better asking for their "cheerful price" because I'm giving them license to give me a high number (or ♾).
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I also like the permission-feeling of receiving such requests in a professional context (h/t , who introduced me to the term in a cold email).
Gives me permission to be idiosyncratic and unreasonable about my schedule / time.
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Normally if someone asks me "what's your hourly rate for a call about X" I just say "not interested"—too fraught. It's a frankly unreasonable number, even when it's not $♾, and I don't want to provide it because then I'll feel uncomfortable if I don't deliver $X of value.
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But if someone asks for my cheerful price to do X, I feel licensed to tell them what amount would make me feel energized about it, even though I know it's probably an unreasonable amount.
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Oh! I think part of why I feel this way is that I'm (extremely luckily) in a position where I'm only going to accept a professional offer at a price which makes me feel cheerful about it. But that's usually not what buyers are seeking, so it feels wildly out of proportion to ask.
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I notice that it's hard to compute a cheerful price. Maybe I'd get better with practice? My naive approach is binary search: try a low-ish price (nope, not excited); try doubling it (meh); double it (wow, yeah!!); okay, try 3/4 of that (hm… pretty good, I guess); add 10%?
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Relatedly: because it's pretty effortful to compute a cheerful price, it's actually a slight burden to be asked! So I suppose there's a bit of "credit" involved—you impose a slight social cost by asking for a cheerful price, so you must be willing to pay with ~high prob to clear.
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