There’s a swimming pool near where I live, and it costs around 70 euros a month (this was the approximate price at my last check, and it works as a monthly subscription. Pay that fee and go as many times as you want that month). I haven’t been there in a while, and if I’m being honest, when I used to go, the routine was always the same.

I’d scan my card, swim my laps, shower (not in winters though), and leave. Sometimes I’d see the same faces in the lanes next to me, but we never spoke. I paid the subscription, I got access, and that was the entire relationship.

Then there’s this gym that a friend of my father goes to. It costs three times as much, but he knows everyone’s name. They celebrate each other’s personal records, go out for drinks, and someone he met there even asked him if he was okay when he missed a week because of a family thing.

Both places charge money, and both of them involve showing up to a physical place and moving your body. But one is transactional, and the other is relational.

I’ve been thinking a lot in the past weeks about the difference between the two, and mostly because I started to search for new places to spend my time online where I actually feel I am part of, I can be myself, and I don’t need to keep pretending to benefit from spending time on those places.

This reflection made me think about all the things that are part of my life. Been thinking about the things I subscribe to, the communities I join, and the platforms I give my money to. From my own perception and experience, I started to look at others, and the more I looked, the more I started to believe that we’re in the middle of a shift that most people don’t realize yet.

I am calling it a transition from paying to have to paying to belong.

Right now, most of what we pay for online is transactional. You subscribe to a streaming service, you get the library. You buy a ticket, you get the seat. You sign up for a newsletter, and you get the email. The examples can go on indefinitely, but I think these are enough to realize the nature of this exchange, which is clean, simple, and completely impersonal. And I believe it’s designed that way on purpose.

And for a long time, this made sense. The internet was built on the promise of access, and on the idea of building a network (and eventually a community). We had more content, more platforms, and more of everything for less. Free was the default, and if something did cost money, it was because we were paying to remove ads or unlock features. We were paying for the thing.

But the more these platforms “evolved,” the more they started feeling empty.

Some people have subscriptions they completely forget about, or memberships to platforms they haven’t opened in a long period of time. (Fortunately, not myself because I am really careful with these things, and I started becoming even more intentional also because of what I am discussing in this essay.)

Today, I have access to more music, film, and writing than any generation before me, and I feel less connected to any of it than when I used to buy a single album from a record store and listen to it until the CD skipped. I am so grateful that I was still able to experience those things even though I’d say I was born at the transition between what we have today and what I previously mentioned.

The access exists, the world is more accessible than ever, and yet belonging feels almost inexistent.

This observation comes from my experience of being inside the attempt of building something that asks people to care, and I’ve felt the difference between someone who reads your work and someone who feels like they’re part of it. I don’t have a massive following, and I am definitely not writing this from a position of authority on media economics. But I don’t think you need a massive following to feel the difference I mentioned, which is, I believe, where the future is heading.

Paywalls will become more common. We have platforms like Substack (on which many publications live behind a paywall), Vice, and even personal platforms that are putting their best work behind a price (as well as many others). The first reaction most people have is resistance.

Why would I pay for something I can probably find for free? Why would I pay when I can use a tool to bypass the wall and read the article anyway?

I asked these questions myself as well some time ago. And they are right. They can do that. The information is rarely so exclusive that it can’t be found elsewhere or worked around. (Not all of it, though, and not in the form it may be presented by a creator.)

But the people who do pay, the ones who choose to, are paying for something more than the article.

When you pay for something, your relationship to it changes. One example I’d like to give is a free vs paid newsletter. The free one may sit in your inbox for days without being opened, while the paid one may be read on the morning it arrives (It has nothing to do with the quality of content, but with the commitment that the act of paying fosters). You chose to be there, and that choice, that small act of intention, is the beginning of belonging.

While paywalls may feel like a source of revenue or feel designed to keep people out, I actually believe that from today on, they will be known as filters designed to bring the right people in.

And by the way, this is not a new idea. The mechanism may be of more recent times, but the instinct has been here for a long time.

Think about the speakeasies (secret, illegal bars that served alcohol behind hidden doors, basements, and unassuming fronts) during the Prohibition era. To get in, you had to know where to go, who to ask, and what to say. There was a cost of entry, which wasn’t always monetary. You had to want it enough to find it, and once inside, you were a member of something hidden, of something that existed because everyone in the room chose to be there.

The flappers of the 1920s belonged to a movement where clothes were the signal, but community was the actual substance, and the cost of entry was simply the willingness to be seen differently.

Decades later, when it emerged, streetwear ran on the same logic. Early Supreme wasn’t really about the box logo that may have made it popular among some people. It was about knowing which Thursday to show up, which store to hit, and which friends to bring. It was about the line. The scarcity was manufactured for identity. If you had the piece, it meant you were there. You belonged to a moment.

Stüssy built an entire tribe before the word “community” became a marketing buzzword and started losing its meaning. The International Stüssy Tribe was a network of people across cities and continents who recognized something in each other. Belonging was the product.

Even street art culture worked this way. The art was free and public, but the community was gated by effort, risk, and reputation. There was no way to buy your way in. You had to earn it, and that was the point.

What is happening now (and will start happening more shortly) with paywalls, paid communities, and subscription-based platforms is a digital version of the same instinct. And it’s happening for a specific reason.

The free internet made everything accessible and nothing meaningful.

I don’t hate the internet. I love it. I built my creative life on it. And to be honest, I don’t even think that the internet’s purpose was to be like this. There was a time when the internet was truly there to build a real network (in other words, a community) and to belong to something. It made the meaningful things more accessible. But with time, we made everything free, everything competing for our attention at the same volume, and we lost the entire point of it.

I wouldn’t say there is no signal anymore, as I actually believe there’s too much of it, and it all sounds the same.

And I genuinely believe this is why people will start paying again. This free, ”everything” and “anything” version of the internet made us feel more alone, not less.

Maybe you are feeling the disconnection as well. The constant noise of social media (which is no longer social), the superficiality of most online interactions, and the way platforms are designed to keep you scrolling rather than connecting make us feel lonelier. We are starving for meaning.

And paying to belong is a response to that loneliness.

I see this playing out in places that most people don’t frame this way.

Patreon started as a way to support creators, but the communities that thrived on it were the ones that understood that the real thing they were selling was the Discord servers, the BTS access, and the feeling that you were part of the process, not just consuming the product. The content was not the product.

I recently got more interested in vinyl collecting, and even this act, which seems like a purely aesthetic choice, is community-driven. People go to the same shops, attend the same fairs, and trade the same stories. Belonging is the experience.

When you buy music on Bandcamp, you are supporting an artist directly, and you know it, and that knowledge changes how you listen. The transaction becomes the relationship.

Compare that to Spotify or Apple Music. We have thousands of songs saved, all for free, and I bet most of us are not even listening to half of the songs that we still have in our collection. The access is unlimited, and the connection is zero.

That’s pay to have in its purest form. It’s convenient, frictionless, and emotionally vacant.

The reason why I believe the shift from having to belonging will only deepen is emotional. It has nothing to do with the financial side of things.

We are living through a period of profound superficiality. I don’t mean this as an insult to anyone, but rather as a description of the environment. The platforms we spend most of our time on are structurally designed for surface-level interaction. The metrics on social platforms are not building blocks of real connection.

And humans, regardless of what the algorithm assumes, are built for depth, for the feeling that somewhere, in some room (physical or digital), people know us and we know them.

I am choosing to be here. I value this enough to invest in it. I want to be part of this specific thing with these specific people.

This is what pay to belong offers. It’s the commitment that matters.

Belonging is not requiring exclusivity for its own sake, but the simple, repeated act of choosing to be present. And I think we’re collectively realizing that the free, frictionless internet, for all its wonders, removed that choice from the equation. It gave us everything and asked nothing, which, it turns out, builds nothing.

I don’t have a grand conclusion for this. I don’t think I need one.

What I know is that most of what we have access to is forgettable, and the things that matter most to us are the ones we choose deliberately.

I also know that the most meaningful experiences of my life, whether in art, in friendship, or in community, were never free. They required attention, presence, the willingness to stay when it would’ve been easier to scroll past, and other things that are on the opposite spectrum of money.

If you’re building something, whether it’s a magazine, a brand, a creative project, or a community, I think the question is no longer how do I reach more people? But how do I create something worth belonging to?

Because people will pay for that simply because they want to be part of something that knows their name.🌹

There’s a swimming pool near where I live, and it costs around 70 euros a month (this was the approximate price at my last check, and it works as a monthly subscription. Pay that fee and go as many times as you want that month). I haven’t been there in a while, and if I’m being honest, when I used to go, the routine was always the same.

I’d scan my card, swim my laps, shower (not in winters though), and leave. Sometimes I’d see the same faces in the lanes next to me, but we never spoke. I paid the subscription, I got access, and that was the entire relationship.

Then there’s this gym that a friend of my father goes to. It costs three times as much, but he knows everyone’s name. They celebrate each other’s personal records, go out for drinks, and someone he met there even asked him if he was okay when he missed a week because of a family thing.

Both places charge money, and both of them involve showing up to a physical place and moving your body. But one is transactional, and the other is relational.

I’ve been thinking a lot in the past weeks about the difference between the two, and mostly because I started to search for new places to spend my time online where I actually feel I am part of, I can be myself, and I don’t need to keep pretending to benefit from spending time on those places.

This reflection made me think about all the things that are part of my life. Been thinking about the things I subscribe to, the communities I join, and the platforms I give my money to. From my own perception and experience, I started to look at others, and the more I looked, the more I started to believe that we’re in the middle of a shift that most people don’t realize yet.

I am calling it a transition from paying to have to paying to belong.

Right now, most of what we pay for online is transactional. You subscribe to a streaming service, you get the library. You buy a ticket, you get the seat. You sign up for a newsletter, and you get the email. The examples can go on indefinitely, but I think these are enough to realize the nature of this exchange, which is clean, simple, and completely impersonal. And I believe it’s designed that way on purpose.

And for a long time, this made sense. The internet was built on the promise of access, and on the idea of building a network (and eventually a community). We had more content, more platforms, and more of everything for less. Free was the default, and if something did cost money, it was because we were paying to remove ads or unlock features. We were paying for the thing.

But the more these platforms “evolved,” the more they started feeling empty.

Some people have subscriptions they completely forget about, or memberships to platforms they haven’t opened in a long period of time. (Fortunately, not myself because I am really careful with these things, and I started becoming even more intentional also because of what I am discussing in this essay.)

Today, I have access to more music, film, and writing than any generation before me, and I feel less connected to any of it than when I used to buy a single album from a record store and listen to it until the CD skipped. I am so grateful that I was still able to experience those things even though I’d say I was born at the transition between what we have today and what I previously mentioned.

The access exists, the world is more accessible than ever, and yet belonging feels almost inexistent.

This observation comes from my experience of being inside the attempt of building something that asks people to care, and I’ve felt the difference between someone who reads your work and someone who feels like they’re part of it. I don’t have a massive following, and I am definitely not writing this from a position of authority on media economics. But I don’t think you need a massive following to feel the difference I mentioned, which is, I believe, where the future is heading.

Paywalls will become more common. We have platforms like Substack (on which many publications live behind a paywall), Vice, and even personal platforms that are putting their best work behind a price (as well as many others). The first reaction most people have is resistance.

Why would I pay for something I can probably find for free? Why would I pay when I can use a tool to bypass the wall and read the article anyway?

I asked these questions myself as well some time ago. And they are right. They can do that. The information is rarely so exclusive that it can’t be found elsewhere or worked around. (Not all of it, though, and not in the form it may be presented by a creator.)

But the people who do pay, the ones who choose to, are paying for something more than the article.

When you pay for something, your relationship to it changes. One example I’d like to give is a free vs paid newsletter. The free one may sit in your inbox for days without being opened, while the paid one may be read on the morning it arrives (It has nothing to do with the quality of content, but with the commitment that the act of paying fosters). You chose to be there, and that choice, that small act of intention, is the beginning of belonging.

While paywalls may feel like a source of revenue or feel designed to keep people out, I actually believe that from today on, they will be known as filters designed to bring the right people in.

And by the way, this is not a new idea. The mechanism may be of more recent times, but the instinct has been here for a long time.

Think about the speakeasies (secret, illegal bars that served alcohol behind hidden doors, basements, and unassuming fronts) during the Prohibition era. To get in, you had to know where to go, who to ask, and what to say. There was a cost of entry, which wasn’t always monetary. You had to want it enough to find it, and once inside, you were a member of something hidden, of something that existed because everyone in the room chose to be there.

The flappers of the 1920s belonged to a movement where clothes were the signal, but community was the actual substance, and the cost of entry was simply the willingness to be seen differently.

Decades later, when it emerged, streetwear ran on the same logic. Early Supreme wasn’t really about the box logo that may have made it popular among some people. It was about knowing which Thursday to show up, which store to hit, and which friends to bring. It was about the line. The scarcity was manufactured for identity. If you had the piece, it meant you were there. You belonged to a moment.

Stüssy built an entire tribe before the word “community” became a marketing buzzword and started losing its meaning. The International Stüssy Tribe was a network of people across cities and continents who recognized something in each other. Belonging was the product.

Even street art culture worked this way. The art was free and public, but the community was gated by effort, risk, and reputation. There was no way to buy your way in. You had to earn it, and that was the point.

What is happening now (and will start happening more shortly) with paywalls, paid communities, and subscription-based platforms is a digital version of the same instinct. And it’s happening for a specific reason.

The free internet made everything accessible and nothing meaningful.

I don’t hate the internet. I love it. I built my creative life on it. And to be honest, I don’t even think that the internet’s purpose was to be like this. There was a time when the internet was truly there to build a real network (in other words, a community) and to belong to something. It made the meaningful things more accessible. But with time, we made everything free, everything competing for our attention at the same volume, and we lost the entire point of it.

I wouldn’t say there is no signal anymore, as I actually believe there’s too much of it, and it all sounds the same.

And I genuinely believe this is why people will start paying again. This free, ”everything” and “anything” version of the internet made us feel more alone, not less.

Maybe you are feeling the disconnection as well. The constant noise of social media (which is no longer social), the superficiality of most online interactions, and the way platforms are designed to keep you scrolling rather than connecting make us feel lonelier. We are starving for meaning.

And paying to belong is a response to that loneliness.

I see this playing out in places that most people don’t frame this way.

Patreon started as a way to support creators, but the communities that thrived on it were the ones that understood that the real thing they were selling was the Discord servers, the BTS access, and the feeling that you were part of the process, not just consuming the product. The content was not the product.

I recently got more interested in vinyl collecting, and even this act, which seems like a purely aesthetic choice, is community-driven. People go to the same shops, attend the same fairs, and trade the same stories. Belonging is the experience.

When you buy music on Bandcamp, you are supporting an artist directly, and you know it, and that knowledge changes how you listen. The transaction becomes the relationship.

Compare that to Spotify or Apple Music. We have thousands of songs saved, all for free, and I bet most of us are not even listening to half of the songs that we still have in our collection. The access is unlimited, and the connection is zero.

That’s pay to have in its purest form. It’s convenient, frictionless, and emotionally vacant.

The reason why I believe the shift from having to belonging will only deepen is emotional. It has nothing to do with the financial side of things.

We are living through a period of profound superficiality. I don’t mean this as an insult to anyone, but rather as a description of the environment. The platforms we spend most of our time on are structurally designed for surface-level interaction. The metrics on social platforms are not building blocks of real connection.

And humans, regardless of what the algorithm assumes, are built for depth, for the feeling that somewhere, in some room (physical or digital), people know us and we know them.

I am choosing to be here. I value this enough to invest in it. I want to be part of this specific thing with these specific people.

This is what pay to belong offers. It’s the commitment that matters.

Belonging is not requiring exclusivity for its own sake, but the simple, repeated act of choosing to be present. And I think we’re collectively realizing that the free, frictionless internet, for all its wonders, removed that choice from the equation. It gave us everything and asked nothing, which, it turns out, builds nothing.

I don’t have a grand conclusion for this. I don’t think I need one.

What I know is that most of what we have access to is forgettable, and the things that matter most to us are the ones we choose deliberately.

I also know that the most meaningful experiences of my life, whether in art, in friendship, or in community, were never free. They required attention, presence, the willingness to stay when it would’ve been easier to scroll past, and other things that are on the opposite spectrum of money.

If you’re building something, whether it’s a magazine, a brand, a creative project, or a community, I think the question is no longer how do I reach more people? But how do I create something worth belonging to?

Because people will pay for that simply because they want to be part of something that knows their name.🌹