When money becomes the measure 

We live in a world of reality and of values. There is what is, like facts, things and events, and there is what we care about, stuff that has value, meaning and significance. These two dimensions differ. Something can exist and be meaningless to us. Something else can be immensely valuable to us and only exist as an idea. Value is a relation between us and the object. It emerges from our desires; the distance between us and what we want, and the effort, sacrifice, and resistance involved in getting it. We don’t value what we can have instantly and effortlessly. We start valuing things when we have to work, wait, and risk something for them. In business terms, a promotion is more meaningful when it took years to earn; a product feels premium when it’s scarce, hard to copy, and not instantly available; a relationship becomes valuable when you’ve invested time, trust, and vulnerability into it. So, we live in a world of values created in the space between us and what we seek.

 

How value emerges from value and friction

Economic value, for Simmel, is just one special case of this more general process of valuing. For something to have economic value, three things must be true:

- First, we desire it;

- Second, it’s not immediately available; and

- Third, it’s not completely out of reach.

Getting something too easy means it has no value for us. If it’s impossible to reach something, it has no value for us. If there’s some resistance to getting it, we give it value. That right distance is what markets, prices, and business models are constantly adjusting. This is also a useful way to rethink talent and careers. Stretch roles, challenging projects, and ambitious yet realistic goals create perceived value for employees. If everything is either trivial or impossible, motivation collapses. Sometimes small rituals or effort cues like onboarding, configuration and intentional decisions increase perceived value. So, value is not in the thing, but in the relation between people, possibilities, and constraints.

 

Money as the form of value, from cattle to code

Historically, money started as stuff: e.g. cattle, salt and metals. These had immediate uses and were visibly valuable. Over time, money became more abstract, i.e. coins, paper, credit, and digital entries. So, money is not value itself, but it’s the form in which value circulates. It does three things.

1. First, it strips away the specific qualities of things and reduces them to a common denominator. A house, a coffee, and a company all come together in price.

2. Second, like a coordinate system for space, money is a coordinate system for value. It doesn’t contain value, but it maps it.

3. And, third, it mediates. It stands between people and things, making exchange easier, faster, and more scalable.

As money becomes more symbolic, it depends less on what it’s made of and more on trust, institutions (states, banks, platforms), and shared beliefs and habits. For leaders, this abstraction has two implications. First, your balance sheet is not your business. Money measures relationships, expectations, capabilities, and trust. If you only manage the numbers and not the underlying relations, you’re steering by the dashboard. That map is not the territory. Second, your product is part of a network. Value is increasingly relational; your service fits into ecosystems, platforms, and social meanings. Price is the surface expression of this network of connections.

 

When means become gods

Money is, in principle, a pure means. It’s good because of what you can do with it. But Simmel notes something we all recognise, and that is that the more powerful a means becomes, the more it starts to be treated as an end in itself. We see this everywhere, e.g. careers are optimised for compensation rather than purpose; companies optimising quarterly numbers at the cost of long-term value; people who collect wealth the way others collect art, with no intention of ever really using it. Simmel calls this one of modern life’s great inversions in which we start serving the tools that were designed to serve us. This shows up in subtle ways at work. Teams work for the process, e.g. KPIs on dashboards, instead of using process to serve real human or strategic ends. Professionals make choices based solely on salary or title, even when those conflict with their values or desired way of life. Simmel's challenge to us would be to keep money and all your other tools in their proper place as means instead of gods.

 

The double face of money

Money, for Simmel, is ambivalent, as both a tool of freedom and a source of alienation. It increases freedom, because it replaces personal dependence on a landlord, lord or master, with impersonal contracts and payments. You can change jobs, vendors, locations. You’re dependent on the system, but not on one specific person. Money allows individuals to pursue non-material or specialised careers because they can support themselves through abstract income rather than direct subsistence. But money alienates too, as it turns relationships into transactions, and as it equalises everything into prices, thereby obscuring qualitative differences. It encourages an intellectual, calculating attitude of what it pays, what’s the ROI, and what’s the cost–benefit.

 

When everything has a price, we become blasé and cynical

Simmel writes that modern professions increasingly become abstract, specialised, and detached from the full meaning of what they contribute. Does this sound familiar? Many knowledge workers don’t see the end result of their efforts. They contribute a small fragment to a vast system. Compensation arrives as numbers on a screen. The consequence can be a blasé attitude. An emotional numbness where nothing feels truly important because everything is flattened into comparable units. One gets cynical because everything has a price, and values like integrity, beauty, or loyalty are treated as negotiable.

We experience daily that economies and organisations thrive on quantification, e.g. KPIs, engagement scores, time tracking and performance ratings. Everything is data-driven. Simmel sees this as part of a bigger change; the explosion of objective culture outpacing subjective culture. The development of systems, tools, products, and content goes way faster than what individuals can meaningfully absorb and integrate.

 

Drowning in data

We now live in a world where there is more knowledge than any single person could ever grasp. Work is subdivided into narrow functions. Cultural content like media, products and platforms, is overwhelming. Money is both a cause and a symbol of this. It enables extreme specialisation, massive, impersonal markets, and distance between producer and consumer. The individual can become a tiny gear in a massive machine, who’s free in theory, but overwhelmed in practice.

For leaders, this raises questions:

- Are your people connected to the meaning and impact of their work, or just to metrics?

- Do your systems serve human development, or are humans serving the system?

- How can you design roles, teams, and cultures so that subjective growth keeps pace with objective complexity?

 

New questions from this classic book

If Georg Simmel would commented on our LinkedIn-feed, I suspect he would ask where value really comes from in our work? Not just price, revenue, or market value, but the effort, distance or closeness, and meaning that make outcomes feel worthwhile. Have your means become your ends? Are money, metrics, tools, and processes still serving human goals, or have they become the goal?

How do you use money’s freedom without adopting its coldness? Can you benefit from impersonal systems while preserving personal dignity, relationships, and qualitative values?

And, are you cultivating both objective and subjective culture? It’s not enough to build systems, products, and processes. How are you helping people actually grow into them? Can you re-introduce distance where everything is instant? In a world of one-click everything, how might you design experiences that restore meaningful effort, anticipation, and reflection?

 

A few practical takeaways I take from Simmel’s writing:

• Design for meaningful effort; steps that signal commitment, e.g. onboarding rituals, learning journeys, and deliberate decision points;
• Reconnect metrics to meaning; when you present numbers, link them explicitly to human outcomes, e.g. customer lives improved, employee growth, and societal impact;
• Guard against the means-as-end trap; regularly ask: “What is this tool/process/money for? Are we still aligned with that?”
• Honour non-monetary value; encourage recognition, craftsmanship, integrity, and beauty as real forms of value, even when they don’t immediately show up on the Profit and Loss statement.
• Invest in subjective culture; training, mentoring, reflection time and narrative all help people make sense of the complex objective world they’re in.

 

Conclusion: Keeping a human centre in a money world

Simmel doesn’t tell us to reject money or modernity, but he asks us to see what money is really doing in our lives and systems. How it creates value through distance, grants freedom through abstraction, and, at the same time, threatens to hollow out meaning. The challenge for us is not to escape the money economy, but to ensure that behind every number, transaction, and tool there is still a living subject who knows what they truly value.

 

Source

Simmel, G. (1900), Philosophie des Geldes, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot.