The Skyrocketing Price of Togetherness

And some good news: you don't have to break the bank to experience togetherness, as long as you know where to find it or how to create it.

We’ll pay almost anything for togetherness.

Right before the Super Bowl, an Israeli friend asked me why it’s such a huge event in the United States. I said, “Well, it used to be the commercials, but those aren’t such a big deal anymore.” I didn’t really have an answer for him.

Until last week, at a Zach Bryan concert in Chicago.

Calling Zach Bryan’s music “country” is like calling me Irish—it’s just barely true. Like Dylan in his prime, Bryan’s songwriting is somehow both poetic and powerful, tough and tender, searing and sensitive—and his fans are, well, fanatical. The United Center was sold out and stuffed with twenty-three thousand people screaming every lyric to every song in wholehearted unison for more than two hours without a breath. It wasn’t an arena, it was an organism, and tickets weren’t cheap.

Because that kind of togetherness is priceless.

I read recently about a mom who took her daughter to a Taylor Swift concert. Right up to the moment they left their hotel room for the venue, she wondered how it could be worth the price of admission. Her question was answered before they even reached the stadium. At a Taylor Swift concert, many fans wear an armful of bracelets, which they exchange with each other before and after the event. As they ran into other Swifties and made their trades, they weren’t just trading accessories, they were trading togetherness.

And togetherness is becoming an endangered experience in our world.

When I was coming of age, for instance, togetherness happened in the high school hallway every Friday morning, thanks to “Must See TV” the night before. We’d trade the newest catch phrase from Seinfeld—"These pretzels are making me thirsty!”—and we’d lament Goose from Top Gun getting attacked in the restroom on ER. We’d have at least a week to marinate in that togetherness, until the next round of episodes arrived.

True togetherness happens when we enjoy the same experience in the same space at the same time.

These days, even when we enjoy the same things, we rarely enjoy them in the same space at the same time. Neighborhood gatherings for the Lost season premiere are ancient history. Recently, friends of ours started watching Ted Lasso, but because we watched it asynchronously, talking about it won’t feel like true togetherness. Noise cancelling headphones guarantee we don’t share the same music, nor even the same experience of the public square. Algorithms make it so we don’t even see the same current events in our news feeds. A dozen kids can gather for dinner but be drawn into a dozen different devices and, thus, a dozen different experiences.

Those changes all happened in just fifteen years, but souls and psyches don’t evolve that quickly, so we have the same need for togetherness as we’ve always had, but diminishing access to it. There’s an economics to that: our demand for true togetherness is as high as ever, and the supply is rapidly vanishing. Supply and demand.

Cue skyrocketing ticket prices for live events.

It cost nine-thousand dollars to get into the Super Bowl this year. It costs almost two-thousand dollars to get into a Taylor Swift concert. If you walked into one of those venues and it was half-full, you wouldn’t think, “Hey, this is an exclusive experience, aren’t I Iucky?” No, you’d feel like the value of your ticket just went down. Why?

Because we’re not really paying for a performance, we’re paying to be a part of something.

It’s why gathering for a meal still matters—same food, same time, same place. Pubs and coffee shops are everywhere. Why? Same brew, same time, same place. Against all odds, book clubs continue to grow in popularity. Why? I think it’s because we get to enjoy the same words together, and then have a discussion about those words in the same time and in the same place.

The really good news, then, is that true togetherness is still available at bargain basement prices.

Last night, for example, it cost me three dollars. That was the cost of admission to my daughter’s eighth grade basketball game. They got clobbered, but in the stands we parents enjoyed getting clobbered together. Nevertheless, it was taking a toll on the girls, so as they took the court for the fourth quarter, I hollered at them, “I’ll buy you all dinner if you score four points this quarter!” One young lady looked at me with fire in her eyes, and I knew the cost of togetherness for me had just gone up by about fifty bucks. Sure enough, she alone scored four points before the buzzer sounded.

Afterward, the togetherness amongst the teammates at the dinner table was worth every penny, and then some.

Not to mention, right as I was buying dinner, one of you upgraded to an annual paid subscription, which costs…yep, fifty dollars. Thank you, Jeanette, for subsidizing some truly priceless togetherness for a bunch of middle school girls.

True togetherness doesn’t need to break the bank, if we’re working to create it together.

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What are your favorite forms of affordable togetherness? Feel free to share yours in the comments (by hitting the speech bubble below), or by Restacking this with a note (by tapping the spinny-circle below). Let’s increase the world supply of togetherness!