Today I suddenly realized what apreciation and respect really mean, from the perspective your market value.

No one knows your true value, including yourself. There are several reasons:

  • You are changing all the time, without yourself noticing that.

  • The world surrounding you is changing all the time, without you aware of that.

  • Your value has at least 2 measures: market value and non-market value. The better you make a distinction of these two, the more you can secure your happiness. Because the market value is what you exchange for your professional work. Non-market value is what your personal life is about, is how you enjoy your life, is something you never sell and you can’t sell.

In the food market, you discover the market value of the food. In the stock market, you get an estimation of the market value of the company. The success of market economy lies on the dynamic change of the price, which fluctuate up and down around the true value. From computer science, it is distributed computing. From democracy, it is a voting mechanism of individuals. From game theory, it is a balance between the buyer and the seller.

Before open market exists, there were already exchange “under the table”. Defeated tribes exchanged their dignity for survival as slaves. Poor females exchanged their beauty for food and shelter for survival. The evoluionary power means every species wants to live a better life, every human wants to gain more with less effort. That’s why the military strong group has a tendacy to use an unfair way to seize more fertile land. That’s why the winner tells the story. If you don’t even survive and raise a bunch of kids, how is going to pass your story?

With further thinking, I come to an idea that the ultimate goal for war is to push the territory boundary. Even a dog knows to urine-mark its territory and bark to strangers. In ancient times, the territory boundaries were vague because human mostly fight against nature for survival. As agriculture develops, human has more interests in controlling lands and expanding its own territory. You never know where is the real boundary until you push it to the limit. World war II is because German and Japan thought they deserve more lands. American revolutionary war is because the white settlers wanted to have their own territory without British’s ruling. American civil war is due to the idea that the southern secessionists want to draw a new line. Poor countries are not able to maintain their boundary, falls into war, and become ecomonically worse. In modern times, rich countries trade instead of war. A hidden fact is that you can use resources to gather high-quality people to create even more fortune. If you occupy a land with military power, the local people are not willing to support you or pay taxes. If you control your people instead of empowering citizens, sooner or latter you will lose the control.

Back to my original topic, appeciation is because you are aware that someone correctly estimates of your intial value and invests his effort to increase your value. Respect is that you don’t cut other’s price tag if you don’t want to buy. Simply because if you don’t care, why do you waste your time damaging other’s self-presentation and self-image? Just bypass these big-ego persons and let the time do its job. Your job is to increase your own real value.