💡 Career Anxiety series For the full picture of why career advancement never quiets your anxiety about the future — and where the exit lies — start with the cluster pillar. → Why Career Advancement Never Quiets Your Anxiety About the Future
Introduction: The Word That Sounds Neutral
Raise your market value. Grasp your market value objectively. Among the words that circle careers, this one, which everyone now uses, sounds neutral, even wise. Not swept along by emotion, evaluating yourself objectively. It sounds calm, adult. So we do not doubt it.
Material on how to raise your market value is plentiful. What this article treats is the ground beneath it: what is actually happening behind the forward-sounding words market value, and why chasing market value can, on the contrary, deepen the anxiety.
Let me give the conclusion first. “Market value” is the price of how much the side buying your labour power is willing to pay you. The graduations on that ruler are cut by the market — the buyer’s side. When you try to raise your market value, you may be handing the right to measure your own worth, willingly, to the market.
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The Graduations on That Ruler Are Cut by the Buyer
Who, exactly, decides the value of a skill you have acquired? Think plainly and it might seem that a valuable skill is a useful skill, and whether it is useful is decided by the nature of the skill itself. But in reality it is not so.
The value of a skill is decided by demand — by how many people want to buy that skill. And it is the side that buys labour power that holds that demand. However many years you spent polishing a skill, if the people who want to buy it disappear, its value approaches zero. Conversely, a skill acquired without much trouble commands a high price if those who seek it come flooding in. How much value your skill holds is decided not by the amount of your effort but by the buyer’s convenience.
This state of being unable to decide your own value yourself is the essential weakness of the position of selling labour power. When you are told let us raise your market value, the ruler that measures that value is held by the market. When you try to raise your market value, you are trying to remake yourself in the direction the buyer will recognise as valuable. It is nothing other than the act of willingly bringing yourself into line with a standard belonging to someone who is not you. The more you chase market value, the more you hand the right to decide your own value over to the market.
The Guise of “Objectivity” Hides the Overwriting
The cunning of this word lies in its wearing the guise of “objectivity.”
“Market value” is spoken of not as your subjective belief but as an unmovable fact set by the objective reality of the market. So obeying it looks realistic and wise. But the value the market sets is never absolute truth. It is nothing but a shifting number produced by the supply and demand of the moment. And yet the words market value promote that shifting number into an objective standard you are to obey.
This weakness works regardless of whether you are excellent. If anything, the more excellent overlook it. Those who hold high skills and are highly rated feel my value is held up by my own ability. But that rating too is held up by nothing more than the buyer’s demand. If demand disappears, however high the skill, it commands no price. The higher-rated the person, the greater the drop of losing that rating, and the deeper the dread. The reason those at the summit are often more anxious than anyone is that they know, somewhere in the heart, that they do not hold the right to decide their own value.
▸ This argument — that anxiety is not an emotion but a designed terrain — is treated in depth in anxiety about the future is not weakness.
“Knowing” and “Being Measured” Are Different
What makes this overwriting troublesome is that “market value” is also a convenient and genuinely useful word. In the scenes of a job change or a negotiation, there is real meaning in grasping your own market value. So you cannot throw the word away entirely.
The problem is that what ought to be a convenient instrument is, at some point, promoted to the sole ruler. To know your market value and to measure yourself by market value are utterly different. In the former, you use market value. In the latter, market value governs you. For the same word, you must not mistake which position it stands in.
If you internalise market value as the sole ruler, you come to feel that only the value the market recognises is your value. You become unable to find your value in what the market does not seek. When you surrender the sovereignty of evaluation to the market, you entrust your worth, whole, to the market’s mood.
Conclusion: Grip the Ruler of Evaluation Back on Your Own Side
What “raising your market value” conceals is this overwriting. It hides, under the neutral phrase objective self-evaluation, the work of moving the ruler that measures your value from your hand to the market’s.
What is needed is neither ignoring market value nor refusing others’ opinions. It is not surrendering the final right to decide what counts as value to the outside. Refer to the market’s rating as one piece of external information, but do not entrust your value to it whole. To take the ruler of evaluation back from the market’s hand into your own — that becomes the key to no longer being driven by a not enough supplied from outside. Receive the overall blueprint as your next step. How this problem of the ruler works across career anxiety as a whole is gathered in why career advancement never quiets your anxiety about the future.
References
Academic papers and theory
- Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (1985) Plenum Press
- Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. “Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being” (2000) American Psychologist, 55(1)
