The author doesn't say that you don't get the return on reading Moby Dick until you have paid the 16-hour price of reading it. What he actually says is subtly but importantly different:
"Only once the second price is being paid do you see any return on the first one."
So he agrees with you: you start getting the benefits as soon as the "second price" is being paid.
And I don't think it's quite right to say that the sixteen hours are the actual reward. They're the space in which some of the actual reward occurs, so to speak. You pay the price of using 16 hours of your time to read Moby-Dick. You get the reward of 16 enjoyably-spent hours, and also the reward of having your brain reshaped in whatever way reading Moby-Dick does for you -- deepening your ideas about friendship or obsession or sailing or whales, etc.
The 16 hours you have to spend are still a price, even though you enjoy spending those hours. (Some people enjoy spending money. They're still paying when they do.) The 16 hours you spend reading Moby-Dick are 16 hours you aren't spending reading The Brothers Karamazov or sleeping or doing lucrative consultancy or talking with your friends.
You are paying the price in the sense of 'time is limited, and you are using some of this limited budget on this endeavor. The point is not that 'paying the price' is unpleasant. The point is that 'paying the price' reduces your budget of available hours.
I think, in addition, there is an 'unpleasant' quality about needing concentration for reading that the author feels more than you do. But that unpleasantness is not the core of the piece. The limited budget is.
Consider someone who reads 10 hours a week and buys 5 books a week. They will be buying books they will probably never read. They are paying the first price but never the second.
It’s not necessarily unpleasant but it does necessarily cost energy, I think. I love figuring out how a new piece of tech works but at the end of a long week when I’m worn out, I just can’t do it any more. If it didn’t have a cost then this wouldn’t be the case.
But that's not a price, I enjoy reading, that what I paid for.
It is not something that costs me anything other than time, however that's not the "price" he's talking about. Otherwise "low price pleasures" wouldn't be a category, if you enjoy that time it's not marginally better than nothing.
The author is framing consumption as having two pools of currency:
1) money
2) time
It costs money to get access to the good you are consuming, and hours to unlock the value. Whether or not you enjoyed reading Moby Dick, you have 16 less hours in the time bank.
If you do enjoy it (I did not), you have paid 16 hours out of the time bank and reaped the reward of 16 hours of pleasurable reading.
There are “cheaper” thrills. I am told you can spend 5 minutes on TickTock and receive some quick gratification. The up front cost is low. The cumulative payoff of spending 16 hours watching cat videos may not be as ultimately rewarding to you as plowing through some classic literature.
Tiltok is surprisingly good. I get: really beautiful girls (bordering on softporn), advice on home DIY, cooking howtos, HIGH end cooking howtos, bartending recipes, vegan recipes, meat BBQ recipes, life motivational videos, really funny short sketches from funny regular people (in several languages), relationship advice, psychologists
All original content. It has its own twist to it. All in 5 to 10 minutes. Everything just flows, I never use any browsing. Just swipe.
EDIT:
I also need to mention that TikTok is host to many, not just one, many emergent properties. Trends take off, people from around the world do the weirdest things which become super popular. Such as ASMR videos, example: whispering secretary
I remember that some years ago, people treated AI who tries to fulfill your deepest desires as some sort of dystopia. Yet, here we are, with the TikTok algorithm trying to guess what you want to see and advanced AIs doing facial reshaping and skin smoothing to make that girl look inhumanely attractive. Let's hope we humans don't end up overly distracted like bees and brown beer bottles ;)
That analogy is desperately tortured. It just ... does not map at all to how I ever perceived reading or fun videos. I never even heard anyone talk about it is those terms.
The time spend by purely relaxing activities like reading or watching is on itself a reward. You do it instead of doing something less pleasant- staring bored at the wall.
And the idea that you could have spent all that time doing something super useful is wrong if it is about opportunity cost. I tried multiple times to cut off all "time wasters" like reading fiction or videos. It ended in low productivity and depression each time.
Imagine you could spend 16 hours enjoying reading without any time having passed in the real world. Then you would still have those 16 to enjoy something else as well. But instead you are actually 16 hours closer to your death. That's the cost. Not the time you experienced, but the time you no longer have.
If I would not be reading, that time would still pass. I would move closer to death by the exact same amount. Literally regardless of what I would do for 16 hours, my life would move exactly 16 hours closer to death.
The assumption is that if you wouldn't be reading, you could do something else that you would want to do. But if you are reading you can't. If you have more time than you know what to do with, then the argument doesn't hold.
I think we only say things about the cost of time for leisure activities when it's not worth it. Example, I heard many times people saying about a bad movie: wow, I wasted 2 hours watching that
Rather than two separate pools, I see it more as that every good's value is a complex number. The "real" part is the sticker price and the "imaginary" part is the time spent to consume or enjoy the good. So while we usually just assume the sticker price is the value of the good, in reality you have to calculate the length of the complex vector.
When you're young and poor, the sticker price seems very close to the actual value, but as you get older and richer, you come to see the time spent as by far the most significant scalar quantity.
I think the “time is money” metaphor is very useful to thinking about time as a limited resource. The average person has about 630,000 hours in their life. Take out 210,000 for sleeping, a largely involuntary time sink. The time cost is truly the more expensive portion. This limited resource consideration is even more important to consider there are strict upper-limits to how much time someone will have, and no one has lived 1,000,000 hours.
I appreciate you say this with humour. But if you voluntary or due to circumstances out of your control cannot distract you brain... At least nine starts thinking. The energy cost is high, but I always end up with a very profound experience and some great outcomes.
So I wouldn't cross out "staring at a wall" as inarguably invaluable. It's what's going on in your head when you do it. Same as when reading that book.
The "time bank" is the opportunity cost of doing something else instead. By not doing something you have thus "saved" that time and can use it elsewhere.
Unless of course, you cant. For example, if you are tired and you are for entertainment, relax or to make you sleep. Or, if you are overworked from those other things and really really need to chill with a book or tictoc right now.
There are 2 costs:
1. Cost in money to purchase,
2. Cost in time to use and manage.
By paying these costs you gain a benefit (of any kind, monetary, pure enjoyment, etc).
These are given.
So far this is pretty easy to agree on, and could be stated in several ways including probably in terms of opportunity costs.
The article's point is that there's a particular relationship between these costs and benefits. Namely, that the first cost only enables you to gain the benefit, but that you can't actually receive the benefit until you pay into the second, time cost. This is interesting because it's easy to forget or miscalculate that second cost, and because the second cost gates the benefit that means you may not be getting the full benefit from paying the first cost.
"Only once the second price is being paid do you see any return on the first one."
So he agrees with you: you start getting the benefits as soon as the "second price" is being paid.
And I don't think it's quite right to say that the sixteen hours are the actual reward. They're the space in which some of the actual reward occurs, so to speak. You pay the price of using 16 hours of your time to read Moby-Dick. You get the reward of 16 enjoyably-spent hours, and also the reward of having your brain reshaped in whatever way reading Moby-Dick does for you -- deepening your ideas about friendship or obsession or sailing or whales, etc.
The 16 hours you have to spend are still a price, even though you enjoy spending those hours. (Some people enjoy spending money. They're still paying when they do.) The 16 hours you spend reading Moby-Dick are 16 hours you aren't spending reading The Brothers Karamazov or sleeping or doing lucrative consultancy or talking with your friends.