Author: Vladisav Jovanović
Status: Preprint
Version: v1.0 (Feb 2026)
This paper argues that the primary danger of variable worth is not emotional fragility but structural steerability. When a person experiences worth as fluctuating with signals (approval, status, desirability, correctness), the self becomes a valuation-tracking system: it monitors the environment for price updates, stabilizes itself through narrative closure, and adapts output to protect valuation. This produces what I call a pricing self—a self for which revision is metabolized as devaluation. In contrast, internal worth that never fades (fixed worth) is introduced as an invariance constraint: a baseline of value that is not tradeable for relief, coherence, or social safety. The thesis is not therapeutic and does not depend on affirmation. It is architectural: fixed worth blocks the conversion of self-value into a reward channel, making agency harder to program and revision easier to survive. The paper closes by explaining why the AI era—defined by abundant ranking signals, cheap finishedness, and rising maintenance load—intensifies variable-worth dynamics and makes invariance central to epistemic sovereignty.
invariance constraint; fixed worth; variable worth; programmability; agency under reward-pressure; valuation; maintenance load; audience entanglement; reflex agency; sovereignty