Why Receiving Payment Feels Like Too Much — Undoing the Habit of Measuring Value by Objects

Introduction: The Guilt of “There Is No Substance”

You passed on knowledge. You gave advice. You delivered what you gained from your own experience to someone who needed it.

And when you receive the payment for it, a strange guilt wells up: I have no material substance to show, and yet I am receiving money. You did not hand over a fine object, and yet you receive payment from the other. That imbalance summons something guilt-like.

Plenty of people are looking for how to price things. What this article examines is the premise beneath it: why the sense too much wells up only when you provide a formless value — its reason.

Let me give the conclusion first. Because we have deeply acquired the habit of measuring value by how much substance is packed into an object. And that habit is produced not by individual character but by the structure of society.

Power Is Not in the Object but on the Side of Relations

First, confirm the premise. We do not doubt that money has power. A person with much money holds a large voice; without money, options narrow. We have watched this scene our whole lives.

But stop here. Money itself is, pressed to its limit, a mere scrap of paper. Take a single ten-thousand-yen note to a desert island; there it serves for little more than tinder.

What does this gap mean? A thing powerless as an object holds immense power in a certain place. If so, that power is not inside the object called money. Power is on the side of the relations between people, connected through money.

When we obey a ten-thousand-yen note, we are not obeying paper. We obey the relations with countless people that the paper promises. But in daily life, those relations recede into the background, and before our eyes only the object called money remains. Then we mistake the source of the power. We feel the power that relations hold as though the object held it.

The economist Karl Marx named this inversion “the fetish character of the commodity” [Marx, 1867]. Value is, originally, born from the social relations in which people exchange with one another. But as a commodity is bought and sold in the market, it begins to look as though it were an attribute inherent in the object itself from the start. The subject is quietly swapped.

What matters is that Marx did not say people are foolish and so are deceived. This inversion is produced, as structure, not by individual belief but by the very social mechanism of commodity exchange.

Where Does the Price of a Cup of Coffee Come From?

Since this may ring abstract, confirm with a familiar example.

A similar cup of coffee is sold in one place for about a hundred yen and in another for over a thousand. The cost of the beans themselves may not differ so greatly. Still, the price sometimes opens tenfold. Where does this difference come from?

What produces the difference is not the content of the object called coffee. It is the environment, the experience, the human craft that the coffee is placed in. The quiet space, the brewer’s skill, the quality of the time spent there. These are not contained in the object itself. Still, they surely push up the value.

But our way of speaking turns this fact inside out. We say this specialty shop’s coffee is worth a thousand yen — as though a thousand yen of value were built into the object called coffee. We speak of value that arose within relations as an attribute of the object.

This attribution is no mere figure of speech. It shapes the very way we feel. Each time we shut value inside an object, the people, places, and time that support it become invisible.

“A Rip-Off” and “Too Much” Are Front and Back of the Same Coin

Here, recall the sensation of the paying side.

Seeing a high price on formless knowledge or know-how, sometimes a resistance crosses the chest: is this not a rip-off? Even knowing in reason it is reasonable, the senses brace.

This resistance arises in a fixed scene: an object poor in material substance carrying a high price. On the other hand, a heavy object that looks to have cost materials, even if expensive, does not raise the same degree of resistance.

That is, the senses were measuring value by how much substance is packed into an object. And when a thing thin in substance carried a high price, they judged it unjustly marked up. This is the very idea of attributing value to the object.

What is interesting is that this judgment happens in an instant. Seeing the price, before examining the content, the senses cry out first — too high. Reason follows after.

And the receiving side’s guilt of too much is the mirror image of this rip-off sensation. Both have their root in the same place. When a high payment moves for a thing thin in substance, the paying side feels robbed, and the receiving side feels I have robbed. The front and back of one and the same coin.

This mirror relation teaches one thing. A person who thought paying so much for that — when their own turn comes to sell something formless — braces with may I receive money for this? The position changed, but the ruler did not. So trying to fix only one side does not go well.

Giving Permission Does Not Change the Ruler

Here lies the limit of the prescription around this guilt.

What is generally recommended is give yourself permission that it is all right to receive. But even if you give permission, as long as the ruler that measures value by objects remains, the guilt of there is no substance raises its head again in another scene.

What is needed is not permission. It is to replace the ruler itself. Value is born not from the substance of an object but from relations. To recompose your view toward that recognition. This is not an adjustment of attitude but a rewriting of how the world looks.

Let me draw a line here. A legitimate judgment of value and a fetishistic resistance must be distinguished. In the world there really do exist overpriced, contentless products. The former is an appraisal after examining the value provided and the price. The latter is a reflexive refusal that looks only at the presence or absence of substance.

The clue to tell them apart is to ask: did I examine the content, or did I brace on the single point that it has no form? Pass through this question and you notice that many rip-off sensations and too much guilts were, in fact, the latter.

Conclusion: That Feeling Is Sensing Something Rightly

Feeling guilt at earning payment for a formless value was neither a moral defect nor weakness of heart. Because the value you provide holds no form, the ruler that measures by objects could not measure it rightly, and the mistake earning payment though there is no substance arose.

And here is one more possibility not to overlook. This guilt may be not a defect to erase but a resistance to a certain inversion.

Money translates every relation into the quantity how much. In that process, the temperature and meaning of relations are erased. Against that erasure, the senses call wait. One can read it so.

If this reading is right, the placement of guilt reverses. It is not a weakness to overcome but a mark of a sensitivity that keeps, undulled, the unease at reducing relations to quantity.

But let me note carefully. I do not mean to say that all guilt is this kind of sensitivity. Sometimes a merely vague anxiety wears the face of guilt. I want to say only one thing. To decide the feeling is weakness out of hand and erase it is a waste.

The first thing to do is not to erase but to listen — to carefully read out what that feeling points to. The whole picture of this reinterpretation is gathered in the true nature of the guilt around earning.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Marx, K. Capital, Volume I (1867), Chapter 1, Section 4, “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret”
• Uno, K. Principles of Political Economy (1964) Iwanami Shoten