What is the value of conversation? This doesn’t appear to be a question that allows for a simple answer. For those who insist on simplification, one can certainly and easily find sufficient platitudes to serve as satisfactory responses. Expressions like “good conversations are priceless” or “conversations have incalculable value” might well fit into philosopher Daniel Dennett’s concept of “deepities”—a term I often reference. As a reminder, a deepity is a statement that contains a factual and trivial truth that appears profound, but whose true meaning is absent or diffuse. Let’s attempt to deepen our understanding beyond such superficial characterizations and explore conversation as both an economic and existential phenomenon.
The speculation that a good conversation can be so valuable and so rich that no number can quantify its worth is easily accepted. Nevertheless, let’s not be satisfied with such a hypothesis and instead explore what this means. The perception that it’s impossible to quantify the value of a conversation may be due to conversation’s intangible nature. Conversations are real but impalpable, like many other phenomena of human experience. A humanist phenomenologist would say that such phenomena are precisely what constitute human experience. A materialist would obviously disagree.
This tension between the tangible and intangible aspects of conversation echoes what philosopher Martin Buber described as the difference between “I-It” and “I-Thou” relationships. When we approach conversation as an “I-It” interaction, we reduce it to its instrumental value—what we can extract, quantify, or measure. But in Buber’s “I-Thou” framework, conversation becomes an encounter between genuine presences where meaning emerges not from extraction but from relation itself. This distinction helps us understand why some conversations feel deeply significant despite producing no measurable outcome.
There are conversations that change people’s lives, both for better and worse. There are conversations that reveal “gold mines” of money to be hoarded. There are conversations that bring ruin—financial and otherwise—to those who participate in them. Notice how I’ve mixed different dimensions that might indicate paths to quantifying the value of conversations. In some cases, I used purely subjective and intangible criteria, such as “changing lives.” In others, I pointed to “gold mines” and “financial ruin,” which can more easily be measured and quantified.
value vs. cost: a dialectical relationship
It’s important to distinguish “value” from “cost” for the sake of clarity. Not having sufficient training or experience in economics-related areas, I acknowledge the likely risk of inaccuracies. However, armed with dictionaries and a careful, fleeting use of a large language model, I’ll venture the following distinction. “Cost” represents the amount paid to acquire a good or service. It’s objective and measurable, and therefore can be easily calculated. “Value” relates to the perception of utility and relevance, to the perceived benefits of something. For these reasons, calculating value is more complex.
This distinction isn’t merely academic—it reveals a fundamental dialectic between cost and value that shapes how we experience conversation. Cost represents the measurable, quantifiable dimension that organizations and individuals can track and optimize. Value represents the qualitative, experiential dimension that often escapes measurement but constitutes the essence of meaningful exchange. These concepts exist in productive tension with each other—each incomplete without the other, yet frequently at odds.
By replacing “value” with “cost” in the question with which I began this essay, the answer will predictably be easier to find. Nevertheless, the indiscriminate use of the two terms in everyday language doesn’t always help. On the contrary, it can hinder the correct distinction and consequent use of these concepts. For example, saying that “a lawyer values their time at 50€ per hour” actually tells us the cost of their time, not necessarily the value we can extract from it. Another example: in professional helping relationships that function through conversation, professionals typically define a price for their service in an intelligible way.
For a psychologist or psychotherapist who charges 60€ for a 50-minute session, the cost of each conversation is clear, and from there, one can even calculate the price of each minute or second. However, if the work done in this context is successful and contributes to improving the life of the person who acquired the service, how does one calculate the value of that service? And of one of those conversations?
This temporal dimension of conversational value is critical—conversations unfold not just in the moment but across time. A therapeutic conversation might seem unremarkable or even painful in the moment, yet catalyze profound insight days or weeks later. The value accumulates in ways that defy immediate measurement, creating what philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer might call a “fusion of horizons”—a gradual expansion of understanding that transforms how we perceive ourselves and our world.
Thinking about weekly psychotherapeutic sessions, let’s consider, for the purpose of the example, nearly 40 sessions per year, accounting for absences and vacations. All conversations have the same cost, but do they all have the same value? I imagine some readers will rightly argue that the value doesn’t come from one or a few conversations but from the psychotherapeutic process, which includes a certain number of conversations in a circumscribed period. This example alludes to the difficulty in finding the value of a single conversation but highlights the value of conversation as a practice, one whose benefits manifest through consistent engagement over time.
A final example: a financial investment advisor charges “X” for their services. In one conversation, they enable one of their clients to close a million-euro deal. How much is that conversation worth? The price of the service or what it allowed the client to gain? Or both? Does one add them? Multiply them? Subtract them? I don’t know how to make such calculations, and perhaps this very incalculability points to something essential about conversation’s nature—its resistance to purely economic framing.
value and cost: the paradoxical economics of human connection
I’ll share some examples that combine the notions of “cost” and “value,” seeking to highlight the complexity of the association between these two ways of quantifying and qualifying a conversation.
how much a meeting costs and how much it’s worth
In 2023, there was news about a measure implemented by an online commerce company, Shopify. They created a “meeting cost calculator” that presented the estimated cost of a meeting based on average compensation, number of participants, and duration. The measure was created as a remedy to combat a notorious “disease” that has taken pandemic proportions in the working world: “meetingitis.” The intention was to encourage company employees to rethink the need to schedule or participate in meetings, making the financial implications of inefficient or unnecessary meetings evident. Of course, all of this would serve to save money or cut costs.
On one hand, we can argue that this cost-cutting would serve to make the value of these conversations evident. On the other hand, we can also imagine that cutting costs in this way would limit the potential value of such meetings. Perhaps the best approach would be a combination of the two interpretations: we cut unnecessary costs and increase the potential value of conversations in the organization.
This example beautifully illustrates what we might call “useful uselessness” in organizational life. The most valuable conversations often emerge precisely when we abandon direct utility as the primary criterion. The serendipitous insight, the unexpected connection, the creative breakthrough—these frequently arise in moments that might appear “wasteful” by strict cost accounting. By attempting to optimize conversation purely through cost reduction, we may inadvertently eliminate the very conditions that allow transformative dialogue to emerge.
I don’t know the effect of this measure, and it seems my curiosity won’t be easily satisfied, given the uncertain nature of the outcome of such measures.
spending money to avoid conversations
A few years before the news about the meeting cost calculator, we were approached by a company that, for obvious reasons, I won’t name. They wanted to contract seven individual development programs—one for each of their seven partners. They wanted to promote the development of these people, enabling faster evolution in their roles as leaders of their respective teams and people. A relatively ordinary request, albeit interesting.
However, in the preliminary conversations to better understand the motivation for the request and the intention of the collaboration, after overcoming several levels of superficiality, we realized there was a problem with one of the seven directors. This person was very competent and experienced in their field but had many difficulties in relationships with the people under their responsibility, and even some peers. The turnover rate was extremely high, and the difficulty in hiring for their team was significant, as their bad reputation was already circulating in the industry and the market. When we questioned our interlocutors about whether they had already approached the person in question about the matter, the response was: “No way!” It was, therefore, a taboo subject among the people in that organization.
Faced with this scenario, we adopted a more provocative stance, using numbers. Our argument: if each individual program hypothetically cost 2000€, they would be considering an investment (cost) of 14000€, when the true objective of the collaboration—the problem they wanted to solve—was changing the behavior of one person. Assuming that the individual development program was suitable for this purpose and would have the desired results, they would still be considering an investment of 12000€ to avoid a conversation they believed they couldn’t or didn’t want to have. This all is not taking in consideration the necessary evaluation, to check if this was a symptom of a systemic dysfunction or, really, a one-person problem.
This example reveals a profound paradox: We often invest significant resources precisely to avoid the free exchange that conversation represents. What does this tell us about our relationship to dialogue in organizational settings? Perhaps it illuminates a fear of the uncontrollable, emergent quality of genuine conversation—its resistance to prediction and control. The difficult conversation being avoided carried risks of emotional discomfort, relationship disruption, and uncertain financial outcomes, as this person was important commercially. The organization preferred to pay a premium for the illusion of control rather than engage with conversational uncertainty.
We didn’t accept the project. Not because we disagreed with the argument offered to us that the other six people could also benefit from this learning experience. The reason for the refusal was that they wouldn’t let us be transparent about the identified problem: we couldn’t mention to the person in question or any of their colleagues the true motive of the project. We refused the project not because we didn’t need the money but because we were very conscious of the value of conversation and because there was no coincidence in the ethical interpretation of the situation. This is no virtue-signaling, masturbatory rant. It’s an acknowledgment of different moral and ethical stances, that could most probably hinder the work itself.
In a similar example, recently, in a conversation where I was sharing my intention to write this text, a friend offered me a similar example. A health clinic had detected a problem with one of its technical staff. This person regularly absented themselves from the workplace, claiming family issues and their own health that they had to resolve. Some colleagues fortuitously found them engaged in trivial activities, and management noticed some “corridor conversations” about the topic. They promptly installed a presence management technology using biometric readings. They never conversed with the person in question.
In either case, it would be possible to calculate the estimated cost of the conversations they sought to avoid. In these examples, the conversations that never happened were worth several thousand euros. There are other cases that I won’t detail, but I’ll leave a note regarding a relatively common phenomenon in organizations related to performance evaluation. There are situations where people in a team or department tend to all be evaluated as having “high performance” or all with poor performance. This type of normalization excuses evaluators from having difficult, uncomfortable conversations, or even from having to think much about people and their performance. How much money will these conversations cost organizations? What other effects will they have on organizational culture, business, and results?
the decline of conversational skills in a digital age
Another aspect that seems to contribute to the difficulty in finding value in conversation is due to the growing transactional nature of the conversations we must have. It seems increasingly difficult to find contexts where it’s possible to converse for the sake of conversation and people with such a disposition. “Time is money,” and conversations that don’t lead to any result cost time, and money. Without predictability regarding the return on that investment, the incentive for many people is non-existent.
This transactionality has been intensified by digital platforms that further commodify our interactions. Social media algorithms reward engagement metrics rather than depth of exchange, transforming conversation into performance. Messaging platforms fragment dialogue into bite-sized exchanges, optimized for speed rather than understanding. Video conferencing tools quantify conversation in precise time blocks, with countdowns that remind us each minute has its price. These technologies don’t merely facilitate conversation—they fundamentally reshape its economics, making explicit the cost while obscuring the less quantifiable dimensions of value. Again, the need for a disclaimer arises: I’m not advocating against being effective and efficient. I’m trying to show that there are other criteria besides those.
Even if the intention is noble, the pressure that is exerted and felt by many of us reveals the difficult decision between lingering in a conversation of uncertain value or the certainty of the cost of time. What legitimacy do we have to criticize those who opt for the certainty of necessity instead of the potential value or just the pleasure that can be obtained from a conversation?
The transactionality of many conversations is also due to the competitive environment in which we live. Physicist David Bohm warned of the dangers of conversing only to compete and not to collaborate. In the book On Dialogue, he shows the differences between “discussion” and “dialogue” and speculates about the disadvantages of only discussing and increasingly being less able to dialogue. In my experience, many of us discuss when we think we’re dialoguing, such is the incorporation of the competitive “spirit” in our lives, which negatively affects the capacity and quality of listening, understanding, empathic capacity, critical thinking, respect for diversity, altruism. As we are in sufficient numbers in this register, the changes will not only be individual but social or even civilizational.
We are required to have the ability to sell things, products, ideas, influence, status. Under penalty of, if we don’t adopt this posture, being considered “passive,” lazy, slow, not ambitious enough, or not sufficiently fierce. Those who do differently are out of time, out of context, and out of the possibility of a certain type of success (more material, one might say).
conversation as useful uselessness
I have the intuition that the real value of conversation is not its commercial value. I’m little interested in the exercise of calculating the exact value of a conversation. You will certainly find those who are interested in such an exercise, and even those who have already done it.
Perhaps what makes conversation so valuable is precisely its resistance to pure utility—its capacity to create meaning and connection that transcends instrumental purpose. In this sense, conversation embodies a profound paradox: its greatest utility may emerge precisely when we abandon the pursuit of utility. Like play, art, or contemplation, conversation may belong to those human activities whose importance lies in their apparent uselessness, their liberation from immediate practical demands.
This brings us full circle to our opening question about conversation’s worth. Perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong question. Instead of “What is a conversation worth?” we might ask: “What kind of worth can a conversation create?” This reframing allows us to recognize conversation not merely as a commodity with a price tag but as a generative practice that brings new forms of value into existence—forms that cannot be reduced to economic calculation.
Perhaps this has been an exercise where I sought, above all, to justify to myself the idea that good conversations have inestimable value, without being left with the feeling of saying or listening to a “deepity.” By exploring the dialectic between cost and value, the temporal unfolding of conversational meaning, and the paradoxical economics of dialogue, we begin to understand why conversation resists simple valuation—not because it lacks worth, but because its worth emerges from a different order of human experience than the purely transactional.