What the audience costs you

The audience seems cheap. A few nerves before a room, a flush at a kerb, a bit of a run-up. Nobody is hurt. Nothing is spent. It's worth setting out what it actually costs, because the price is paid in small coins and never added up.

It costs the window table. Not once, but every time, so that the good seat is always someone else's. It costs the class you didn't join, the exercise class, the language class, the evening course, because a room of strangers doing something new is the beam at full strength. It costs the point in the meeting, and the one after that, until people assume you haven't got points. It costs the gig on your own, the film on your own, the restaurant on a Thursday when the flatmate's away. It costs the long way round, the route past the wall tables, the door that avoids the group.

It costs the outfit you'd have liked to wear and the haircut you'd have liked to try, because both are marks, and it costs the small unplanned things, the dance at the wedding, the wave to someone across a street who might not be who you think.

And it costs attention, which is the price underneath the others. In every room where the beam is on, a large share of what you've got is pointed at yourself. The café you went to for the coffee and the book, you spent partly on monitoring your own arms. The meeting you went to for the decision, you spent partly on your own voice. The evening out with friends had a walk to the bar in it that took more of you than the conversation did. Add the run-up before and the sting after, and the room has swallowed an evening.

None of this is dramatic. That's why it goes unnoticed. But if you added up, over a year, the tables not sat at and the things not said and the hours of run-up and sting, you'd find that an audience that doesn't exist has been charging rent, and that you've been paying it in the currency you have least of, which is attention that could have gone on the room.