Putting a price on labor has never been all that easy.

Industry made it somewhat easier when it decided that all work would be performed and rewarded the same way, to the same standard.

But of course that was never the full story: people brought their whole selves to work, as they always have. They were paid for their ability to accomplish defined tasks, but not for the decision to get out of bed and go to work each day, or the ability to keep fellow workers going with a wry joke.

Today, the great invitation is to create our own work. That means giving up what we came to accept as certainties: the job description, the pay scale, the shift whistle.

It means knowing when and how and why we work and valuing it accurately and appropriately — even and especially when our labors are untraditional or completely unseen.

The Industrial Revolution didn’t just break bodies — it broke minds.

The solution, which had a twisted genius to it, was to provide gin to the workers in order to take their minds off their work so the factories could have their bodies. In Seth Godin’s telling,

“there were 20 years when basically everyone in Manchester, England, was an alcoholic. Instead of having coffee carts, they had gin carts that went up and down the streets. Because it was so hard to shift from being a farmer to sitting in a dark room for 12 hours every day doing what you were told. But we culturally evolved to be able to handle a new world order.”

The economy is (slowly, painfully, unevenly) evolving beyond industrialism.

But is our cultural evolution keeping up?

Being on the farm, not being told what to do, isn’t nearly as unnatural to the human experience as it might seem to those of us who can read and write blogs all day.

The connection economy demands the freedom and responsibility of our now-latent agrarianism, but it won’t forget the scale and efficiency of the industrialists, either. The pendulum swings back, but the world has turned.

Cultural evolution is never easy, and evolution toward freedom might be much harder than it sounds. Right on time, along comes Facebook with the greatest gin cart ever invented (until it, too, is out-“innovated”).

Bottoms up?

In his essay “The Agrarian Standard,” the philosopher, poet, and farmer Wendell Berry writes:

“What we have undertaken to defend is the complex accomplishment of knowledge, cultural memory, skill, self-mastery, good sense, and fundamental decency — the high and indispensable art — for which we can probably find no better name than ‘good farming.’ I mean farming as defined by agrarianism as opposed to farming as defined by industrialism: farming as the proper use and care of an immeasurable gift.”

If it’s true that, in the connection/creative economy, “we are all artists now,” it stands to reason that we all bear the responsibility of “good farming,” as Berry uses the term here.

The great news and the scary news are one and the same: the price of moving beyond industrialism is re-learning the proper use and care of immeasurable gifts — inside us and outside of us; given and earned.

As long as there have been industrialists (at least of the old school), they have wanted to make it seem more frightening to take that responsibility upon ourselves than to cede it (along with our labor) to the captains of industry. After all, they know best.

Except, of course, they don’t. And the price of refusing responsibility is starting to look higher and higher.

If we’re already flying into the waves, staying low is no longer the safe option. Flying higher only feels scarier — as any immeasurable gift should.

One of the easiest ways to get stuck in scarcity mode is to leave needs and wants unspecified.

All you can feel is I never have enough, and as long as enough seems unimaginably far away, you don’t do the relatively easy work of imagining it.

You don’t have to connect too many dots to make some rough calculations about what it would take to feel you have enough to live with. Pick a place, find the average rent. Pick a job, find the pay. Pick a goal, put a number on it. Pick enough, you’ll have budget.

Then work backward: it’s not much of a leap from there to figure out what you’ll have to earn for the number of hours you’re willing to work to support the life you want.

Don’t throw out the calculations, though — once you’ve made enough, you can start taking less money for opportunities to make a bigger difference.

At least as early as 2012, Seth Godin was able to claim that the biggest chasm in pricing is between $0.00 and $0.01.

Until you start charging, it’s really hard to know what your work is worth (in the market).

Once you’re able to make the leap from giving everything away to charging for some of it, you can start to experience your own price story.

And, once you’re there, it’s much easier to align your price story with your money story — and your values.

Re-reading my notes from the On Being Gathering last Presidents Day weekend, I came across the following line from the poet David Whyte:

“Go beyond yourself. Be more generous than you thought you could be.”

Virtually every source I trust on this insists that value-creation is the only worthwhile (or ethical) focus if you want to make money.

Steve Pressfield says we have the right to our work, but not to the results. Seth Godin says to charge a lot (a topic for another time) — and be worth more than you charge. Mark McGuinness and Naomi Dunford each talk about plussing (or even doubling) the distinctively valuable parts of our work.

This isn’t a shortcut. It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme. It’s also not inconsistent with the idea of working for free only as an intentional investment.

Rather, it’s a choice to fly without a net, to trust that generous work that matters will be noticed and richly rewarded — sometimes even with money.

It’s internship season again: people are proudly announcing what they’ve lined up for the summer, or starting to really scramble to get something set up.

Unpaid internships are such a part of the culture now, and there’s (rightfully) plenty of debate as to whether that’s healthy or not.

The trick is that there’s a fine line between an investment in future opportunities versus indentured servitude. And it really pays to know the difference — in the short run and the long.

If you’ve got an opportunity to be a linchpin, it might be appropriate to intentionally work for free for a short time. (And, of course, it’s worth showing up as a linchpin in any role — especially if you’re not yet getting paid, but wish to.)

If it doesn’t look like there’s a realistic shot at becoming a (paid) linchpin anytime soon, however, it might be worth asking some tougher questions about whether it’s worth doing, or whether your talents might be better invested — and invested in — somewhere else.

The internship industrial complex runs in large part on the assumption that there’s no other way. Could we start turning a different ratchet instead — one that rewards organizations that offer great work (and fair compensation), as well as people who show up and do great work (even if only for a short while)?

When was the last time more stuff was the solution?

Way too much of our economy is dedicated to making more junk, and way too much of our culture is dedicated to making us want to buy it.

This isn’t utopia. We’ll always be making and buying things.

The question is whether they’re the right ones.

This question is at the heart of any money story.

It tends to be especially sharp when you’re just starting out: “If only I could make some money, I’d be OK.”

But, once money starts happening, you pretty quickly confront the question of how much it will take to feel OK now: you used to worry about buying food; now, you’re trying to go to the right restaurants.

Pricing isn’t easy for anybody. But Seth Godin provides a good guiding principle when he says to “charge a lot and be worth more than you charge.” After all, if it’s true — as he also says — that price is a story, you can create a story about delivering magic even if it costs a lot of money.

“Enough” sits at the intersection of what you charge and what you’re worth. Once they start charging, some people get obsessed with charging a lot — just because they can. “This is what the market will bear,” they say. Or maybe “This is a measure of the value I’ve created in the world.”

Other people are focused on being worth more than they charge — sometimes to their own disadvantage. The graduate student on his umpteenth unpaid internship with no job prospect in sight. The do-gooder with student debt working for pennies with a nonprofit.

It’s easy to poke fun at the first group, and I’d agree that they’re often in the wrong — or at least adopting a posture I don’t condone. But the second group is tricky. They — and their good intentions — are often hidden in plain sight. The question is, is it better? Is it right?

Everyone has to confront the question of “enough” at some point. It’s better to do it early and often. Otherwise you might never have enough.

Industrialism scales sameness: once we’ve figured out how to make a tomato that can take the rigors of growth and transport, we devote an entire town to producing as many of them as possible. Then we trust that their sheer ubiquity will teach people that that product is what tomatoes are supposed to be like. Taste and nutrition are secondary concerns in this mode — if they come up at all.

Agrarian scaling starts with the specific and builds toward influence — not replication — across contexts. It’s the answer to a different question: “How do we teach people what tomatoes are supposed to taste like and make them available only when they taste like that?”, rather than “How can we make it possible for anyone, anywhere to buy something called a tomato at any time?”

If you’re trying to make a difference, you need to know and decide which kind of tomatoes you’re producing, and why.