Nobody wants to admit they paid for a conversation

I ran a company for three years that never worked. In that time I paid a barber every month who listened to more of my problems than my co-founder did. I paid a consultant €4,000 for a deck I never used, and the useful part was a fifteen-minute tangent on the phone afterwards. Both of those were conversations I paid for. Neither felt strange.

Then someone offers you twenty minutes of undivided attention with the price written on it, and suddenly it is uncomfortable. That is worth poking at.

The transaction was always there

Bartenders, hairdressers, taxi drivers, physios, coaches, priests in some countries, therapists in others. A large amount of the honest conversation in an adult life happens with someone who is being paid to be in the room. We are comfortable with it because the payment is attached to something else — a haircut, a diagnosis, a drink. The talking arrives as a side effect and nobody has to acknowledge it.

Take the haircut away and the same twenty minutes feels transactional. It is not more transactional. It is just more honest.

What you are actually buying

Not advice. Advice is cheap and mostly wrong, including mine. What you are buying is attention without obligation, and that is genuinely scarce.

When a friend listens to you, you owe them. You will listen back, you will remember they were bored, you will not tell them the same thing twice. That debt is what makes friendship good and it is also what makes friendship a bad place to be repetitive. Most people need to say the same worry out loud nine or ten times before it resolves into a decision. You cannot do that to a friend. You can do it to someone whose time you paid for, and neither of you owes the other anything afterwards.

The uncomfortable bit

People ask me whether it is sad. I think the sad version is the one where you have a problem you have been circling for eight months and you do not talk to anyone about it because you cannot think of who you would owe.

A conversation here costs less than the coffee you would have bought to have it in person. If it is bad you have lost the price of a coffee. If it is good you have talked to someone who was fully present for half an hour, which is more than most of us get in a week.

Just do not expect it to be profound. Most of mine are not. Someone tells me their idea, I tell them the boring part they were avoiding, and they go away slightly annoyed and slightly clearer. That is the job.