Not to detract from the main gist of your essay, but you are indeed ‘paying’ — and you have leverage, virtually :)

You pay with your time as well as your intelligence (the latter in a literal sense of what-you-know and the opportunity cost of what-you-don’t-get-to-know). These are the most precious and scarcest commodities in a creative life. Both are irrevocably harvested from you, drawn and quartered, and sold to the highest bidder through a variety of largely value-destroying schemes, chiefly advertising.

Understanding this equation is a critical step towards freedom: both at a personal level, seeing your role as a tradeable commodity in a monopoly-making pyramid scheme, but more crucially, in thinking creatively about how to approach the long global battle for ‘humanity’.