What is anything worth? What is the real value of any thing or skill or company? A good answer is “What the market will bear”, but any examination of that phrase leaves an empty feeling in the stomach of someone trying to get what they can for whatever it is they have to sell. A better answer is, ultimately, “nothing”.

Say for a moment that you have a used car lot full of cars. You can estimate what you think they will sell for, and the total of this is what they are worth. That assumes a normal process of sales with the usual excited customers cooing over the one they picked out like a puppy at the pound. After the usual buzz of haggling, a suitable price is found and everyone can excitedly pretend they got the better end of the deal.

What if these cars all had to be sold suddenly at liquidation? Some might not go to a good home after all, and might wind up at the scrap yard. They might all be worth considerably less than anyone thought.

The worth of anything comes down to the used car lot value of it. The sale of anything is a process, not an event. Perceptions of quality can raise the value as much as anything real. This also is true when selling your skills. It starts with a carefully organized resume, but ultimately comes down to how you can steel yourself to confidently pitch them in an interview. Women and minorities are routinely paid less for the same jobs for reasons that defy anyone’s explanation.

For all these reasons, the value of anything is a purely social construction. It is our faith in the systems that deliver goods that sets the expectation of quality which determines the price in most cases. The entire economy that operates beyond our human contact is about faith.

The larger the market that items come from, the larger the faith any buyer has to have. But at a scale far beyond the human scale, how can you possibly have faith in the whole world? The more sales operates beyond the ability to touch and smell an item, the more the concept of value relies on faith rather than a more personal and human experience involving a slightly sweaty handshake and the pithy turn of a phrase.

Taking away the more basic human elements of sales takes away the human elements of value. The entire concept starts to seem abstract and even fixed, when it is not.

That is why every item or skill that someone is out there pitching right now is not worth a thing by itself. Concepts like value in money are closely tied to values in the personal and social sense. You sell the sizzle, not the steak.