Terminally useful and useless effort in caring

October 18, 2026

When you care for someone, you expend effort on their behalf. There are two importantly different types of effort: effort in service of something useful, and effort that isn't in service of anything useful. I call these "blue" effort and "hashing" effort.

• Blue effort refers to effort expended to fulfill a desire of someone. For instance, to find a flower that is just the right shade of blue. I've already discussed in Heat up your water why it is often worthwhile to fulfill fanciness desires, even if they are "frivolous".
• Hashing effort refers to effort that isn't terminally useful. "Mine bitcoin before talking to me".

Here's an example of decomposing an act of caring into blue and hashing components:

Taking a 1hr train ride to go visit your friend.

1. Blue: Interacting with people in person is often more meaningful than over the phone.
2. Hashing: If you could've just teleported to see your friend, that would not obviously impinge on your ability to have a nice in-person interaction with your friend. So, the act of sitting in the train is hashing. If you made it so that you did not have to take the train, because you had a teleporter (or you could sleep / work on the train and those were the prefered activities that you would've done even absent seeing this friend), then that would project out the hashing component of this interaction.

Blue caring effort is more desirable than hashing caring effort. Should we even care about hashing caring effort at all? I claim there are still substantial benefits to hashing effort. It's a worse type of effort but still somewhat worthwhile.

Benefits of hashing#

The main benefit of hashing is "signaling". However, there are several pretty distinct types of signaling at play that are worth separating here.

Practice and meditation

• Taking the train to see your friend is a way of practicing caring for your friend.
• When you sit on the train you will likely think of your friend. Spending more time thinking of them can increase the strength of your connection.
• Caring for someone via hashing builds trust that you will care for them (including in blue ways) in the future.

Self signaling.

• When you sit on the train for an hour, it's a kind of meditation. You are mentally preparing yourself to be fully invested in seeing your friend (ideally).
• Sitting on a train for an hour is a type of commitment (if you are subject to sunk cost fallacy, as humans fortunately tend to be). If you hadn't made the long journey out to see your friend, you might be more tempted to leave more quickly. You might perceive the event as less special and put less effort into it.

Other signaling.

• Signaling calibrates people on what requests are reasonable to make in the relationship.
• Signaling with hashing is a way of making it clear to both parties to take an event seriously.