Priced by the hour

Photo by Ryan Stone on Unsplash

When even togetherness comes with a receipt.

It’s daunting how expensive existing has become.

You walk into a café, order a drink, and already feel the invisible clock ticking. Stay too long, and you start to sense the barista’s polite glance: "time’s up." Outside, even park benches seem to belong to someone else: fenced off, “reserved for customers,” or turned into pop-up markets. There’s nowhere left to simply be.

I sometimes feel like I’m paying rent for every minute I spend outside my apartment. Every conversation, every gathering, every moment of stillness is priced by the hour. I can already feel my wallet slimming as I write those lines. That feeling has been excruciated since the end of the pandemic, with inflation beating record new heights and businesses struggling to keep up with new habits from months of lockdown. When community is forced to move apart for so long, it’s difficult to bring it back together.

I remember once upon a time, there were places that didn’t ask you to buy anything. Third places, we used to call them. Those corners between home and work where people naturally gravitated toward one another. Where we could just be ourselves, not broken customers.

Libraries, cafés, bookshops, record stores, parks. Those spaces used to be filled with quiet laughter, nods of recognition… the kind of familiarity that didn’t need to be announced or measured. We went there because it felt natural. Because we could find our peers and common ground.

When community is priced out by profit

But those places are rapidly fading. Collapsing piece by piece under pressure from rising rents, corporate takeovers, and profit-driven mentality. They’re being replaced by louder, shinier, more “profitable” spaces. Last time I went back to my hometown, I was heartbroken to see that all the playfields of my childhood had been decimated — replaced by construction sites and billboard advertising upcoming high-end restaurants with 2 months waiting lines and skyscrapers with purchase prices that seem to reach for the moon. Community can’t compete with commerce — and children are the first to pay the price.

But somehow, we pretend all of it makes sense.

We meet less to talk and more to network.We rest less to breathe and more to recover from productivity.We post more, and share less.

Even friendship now feels like a subscription model. Something you maintain through reminders and apps rather than instinct and reaching out. Every time I try to connect, I feel the cost of it. Not just in money, but in energy, attention, and in the quiet guilt of not “showing up” enough.

When everything becomes transactional, community becomes a luxury.

And connection—something we once built effortlessly—starts to feel like a rare commodity.

Maybe that’s why solitude cuts deeper now. It’s not just being alone, it’s realizing that most of the places that used to make you feel a part of something no longer exist. I’ve tried to recreate them in coworking spaces and through endless walks in the park and meetup events, but they can’t replace the accidental intimacy of being among people without needing to prove why you’re there. The simple comfort of belonging quietly.

I don’t think we can rebuild the world as it was, even though I wish we did. But we can reclaim little fragments of it. We can linger in a bookstore, even if we don’t buy anything. Smile at the person sitting alone at the transit beside us. Show up at a local event, even if we stand in the back with a coffee and a racing heart.

Because presence still matters. And even small, silent acts of community are resistance against the loneliness of our time.

We used to gather for the joy of it. Now we meet on the clock.

Maybe the first act of rebellion is to stop counting the minutes, and start noticing each other.

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