Georg Simmel spent the last years of the nineteenth century walking through Berlin as it transformed into the first true money economy Europe had seen. He watched a city where a painting, a afternoon of labor, and a bag of potatoes could all be reduced to the same number on a price tag. That should have been unremarkable. Money does this. It’s the whole point of money.
What unsettled Simmel wasn’t the economics. It was what happened to people once they lived inside a system built entirely on that logic.
He noticed that once everything has a price, people start to feel priced too. Not metaphorically. Structurally. The habit of translating quality into quantity doesn’t stay contained in the marketplace — it leaks into how a person understands their own mind, their own time, their own worth.
He wasn’t writing a warning about capitalism. He was writing the first accurate description of the panic you feel filling out a “Skills” section.
The Concept: Commensurability
Simmel’s term for this was commensurability — the process by which incomparable things get made comparable, so they can be exchanged. A sunset and a sandwich have nothing in common until money assigns them both a number, and suddenly they can be traded against each other.
Here’s the part nobody tells you: once a mind has been trained to think in commensurable terms, it doesn’t stop at the checkout counter. It applies the same operation to itself.
You can watch this happen in real time. LinkedIn asks you to list your “top skills,” and you find yourself ranking them — not by what you enjoy, but by what has resale value. A friend mentions they’ve picked up pottery, and the first question that surfaces, uninvited, is whether they could sell the bowls. You catch yourself calculating whether learning a language is “worth it,” as though fluency were a stock and you were checking its return.
None of this is vanity. It’s commensurability, fully internalized. You have become the kind of object that can be priced, because you learned to price everything else first.
The specific anxiety — am I valuable enough — isn’t really a question about your worth. It’s a category error. You are applying a unit of measurement designed for commodities to something that was never a commodity to begin with. The dread doesn’t come from failing the test. It comes from the fact that the test shouldn’t exist, and some part of you knows it, and asks anyway.
What This Costs You
Once your self-concept runs on market logic, rest becomes suspicious. Not because you consciously believe leisure is wasteful — you’d deny that if asked — but because a mind trained in commensurability treats every hour as an asset that should be generating a return.
This is why “unmonetized hobby” has become an almost paradoxical phrase. Why people apologize for reading fiction that “won’t help their career.” Why a Sunday afternoon with nothing produced in it can feel less like rest and more like a loss you’ll need to make up later.
Simmel’s darker suggestion — the one he never fully resolved — was that this isn’t a distortion of the money economy. It’s the money economy working exactly as designed. The system doesn’t need you to believe you’re a commodity. It only needs you to act like one, consistently, without noticing the substitution.
You didn’t misunderstand your worth. You learned to calculate it using the only unit the culture gave you.
The mechanism behind this — the part that actually changes how you make decisions — is what we go into on Wednesday. It’s paid. It’s 30 minutes. It’s the reason most people subscribe.
I'm looking for a job in my early twenties and viewing my own personality through the lens of employability has been very stressful for me.
It’s interesting how Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a positive influence towards democracy, yet didn’t favor capitalism.
He also asserted that man was better off without property. But, knowing that it is inevitable, promoted just laws and a good society.