An hour paid for is still an hour lived by the person providing it.

Buying someone’s time does not convert it into a commodity for them. For you it is a line on an invoice; for the cleaner, the driver, the carer, the support agent, it is an hour of their actual life, one of a finite number, spent in your company or your house. Payment settles the transaction without settling the human fact underneath it. Forgetting that is what makes people talk to service staff as though they were software.

Treat the hour as a shared one this week. Learn a name, ask something real, and let the exchange be brief without being blank.