The Price of Presence

Think about the last time you were in a crowd at something that mattered to you: a concert, a game, a theatre — maybe a religious event. A few people, maybe a few hundred or a few thousand, all in the same space, each pointing their attention in the same direction.

Why do we do that?

On the surface, you'd say we do it to see the thing — to watch the game, hear the music, experience the performance.

Sure, that's part of it. But if you look a couple of layers underneath, I think we're buying something else entirely — something we don't have a good word for anymore.

We're buying presence.

Not just the players' presence. We're investing our own as well.

Because here's what happens in those moments: the players on the field or the ice, the musicians on the stage, the actors under the lights — they're not thinking about their mortgage or what they said at dinner last week or whether they remembered to respond to that email.

They are right there. Fiercely, completely, unapologetically there. In their body. In the moment. Doing the thing they do — the thing we paid to be in the presence of.

And something in us recognises that, responds to it. And — depending on a thousand factors — if we're lucky, we might match it.

For a couple of hours, we're not scrolling through the highlight reel of anxiety; we are watching, fully invested. The invisible purchase is the return to ourselves beyond the event itself. And the communion in presence.

There's something else going on too, and it's the thing I find genuinely beautiful about these gatherings.

We are each other's best selves in those moments.

The athlete, the musician, the performer — they are at the absolute apex of what they do. The peak expression of years of practice and dedication, offered up in real time, in front of witnesses.

And the crowd? We show up for that. We've travelled, paid, waited in line, dressed up, made arrangements. We are present in our willingness to be present.

Two apotheoses meeting in a moment of mutual recognition — and that recognition happens at a level far below everyday awareness. On the surface we're glad to be there, excited by the players and the playing. But there's a slow, low rumbling beneath that lights up something in us.

Which makes me think about the rest of what we find ourselves engaged in — because most of the time? We don't do this at all.

The person in the car beside us at the red light — we don't see them unless they do something that irritates us. The person next to us on the train, the plane, the bus. The person in the next office we pass twenty times a day and occasionally nod at. The stranger walking toward us on the pavement, whom we look through.

We are surrounded by people almost constantly, and we are almost entirely absent from each other.

Nobody's a villain here. Absence has a mechanism, and it's a simple one: our attention is on a slight or an insult or an injury that occurred in the past or might occur in the future. The emotion generated by that recollection or anticipation pulls us out of the reality of the current moment — where something worth noticing is always happening — and deposits us in what Denis calls the illusion of emotion. We're elsewhere. Trapped in place by something that isn't actually occurring.

But there's a cost.

We know the price of presence because you can assign a monetary value to it in this context. It's the ticket. The travel. The time. The planning. It's not cheap.

The cost of absence is quieter. Denis would call it the mortgaging of the body — the low-grade tension that accumulates when we spend our days physically surrounded by other humans but emotionally sealed off from them and from the reality of the moment. The withering of something in us that needs — genuinely needs — to be witnessed, and to witness. The atrophying of our capacity to be moved — until in some cases we're clinging to whatever still gets through, the way an alcoholic grips a glass.

We are wired for this. Whatever you believe about where we came from and why we're here, we are clearly, undeniably, built for contact. Not just digital contact. Not just the managed, curated contact of a feed or a chat window. Actual contact. The kind where someone can see your face and you can feel the energy in a room and something in your nervous system settles down because — ah, yes — I'm among people, and this is real.

The ticket to presence costs money.

The cost of absence costs us something we can't get a refund on.

The Hümmo Method — Energy Healing for the Rest of Us arrives August 18, 2026. It's a book about getting back to yourself without needing to believe anything first. Get on the waitlist here.