I suspect there are multiple things going on. First and foremost, the vast majority of uses of time have non-monetary costs and benefits, in terms of enjoyment, human interaction, skill-building, and even less-legible things than those. After some amount of satisficing, money is no longer a good common measurement for non-comparable things you could do to earn or spend it.
Secondly, most of our habits on the topic are developed in a situation where hourly work is not infinitely available at attractive rates. The marginal hour of work, for most of us, most of the time, is not the same as our average hour of work. In the case where you have freelance work available that you could get $1.67/minute for any amount of time you choose, and you can do equally-good (or at least equally-valuable) work regardless of state of mind, your instincts are probably wrong—you should work rather than any non-personally-valuable chores that you can hire out for less than this.
I suspect there are multiple things going on. First and foremost, the vast majority of uses of time have non-monetary costs and benefits, in terms of enjoyment, human interaction, skill-building, and even less-legible things than those. After some amount of satisficing, money is no longer a good common measurement for non-comparable things you could do to earn or spend it.
Secondly, most of our habits on the topic are developed in a situation where hourly work is not infinitely available at attractive rates. The marginal hour of work, for most of us, most of the time, is not the same as our average hour of work. In the case where you have freelance work available that you could get $1.67/minute for any amount of time you choose, and you can do equally-good (or at least equally-valuable) work regardless of state of mind, your instincts are probably wrong—you should work rather than any non-personally-valuable chores that you can hire out for less than this.