I think it’s partly because we’ve been raised in a culture that wants people to feel evil for it. If you know what you are looking for, you can see it implied in SO much of what we regularly do and say.
It sucks because I have a serious insecurity about this. It’s like a weird religious sort of guilt that I would ask for money, or charge a higher price, or not just “do it to help this person out.”
Another possible complication is how our modern world is disconnected to the actual making of things. I see it all the time in the art world. There’s a deep abiding resistance to paying someone who “just magically made something appear” with their own hands and brain. Will didn’t just go effortlessly pick his creations off the magical Code Tree. People don’t see the actual work and definitely don’t consider the years it took to be able to produce that work either. This is a topic that I’m still working on defining and exploring in my writing. In all manner of scenarios, people who would pay the asking price for an existing commodity without hesitation, often balk completely at paying a fair price for something created out of thin air and raw materials. You’re lucky if you get the price of your materials covered, often even that goes at a loss.
