I Got Next

Banishing venmo brain in friendships

one of the greatest possible gifts a friend could give

A friend recently pointed out how venmo has ruined friendships. Sometimes he just wants to buy a friend a $3 coffee without expectation of being immediately paid back, exact change and all.

Obviously there is a high like no other when you instantly get someone back on the payment app of your choice. You show that you are, without a doubt, not a freeloader. You pay attention. You even noticed the full and final amount with tax and tip! You don’t even need your friend to remind you later. Of course, if there is an expectation of payback, these are all A+ qualities to have as a friend. 

But what if it was, as they said, a true gift? Nothing sneaky about it?

I couldn’t help but think of this payment app ping-pong when friends supported my household after some recent bad health and housing drama. My forehead pulsed with stress by each evening. They brought butternut squash soup and lent thermometers, checked in daily, offered very legitimate medical advice (it’s ok they are nurses), theorized about tenant law and sat out back with us in our dinky fluorescent orange adirondack chairs in the hot/cold/hot early autumn sunshine.

I didn’t know what to do with all of that kindness. 

At one point I thought I might make a commemorative card for everyone who helped during this time – like a collectible for a terrible September – before remembering that I don’t have the time or energy to do that, and nobody was asking for it. But I love doing things nobody asked for! What was happening to me?

an image of gifting during hard times from Lewis Hyde’s “The Gift” (which had the tagline of “Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property” in its first edition – isn’t that so sick??)

When I paused for five seconds, I understood why the idea felt so off. My impulse to do something in return for my friends’ kindness was just that: an urgent, almost guilty impulse. I wanted to instantly pay back their love, even if I wasn’t actually in a better place to do that yet. Even though what they offered me was a gift. 

I wanted to show them – quickly – that I appreciated what they did, even though I already verbally thanked them. More than just being grateful, I think I wanted them to know I was grateful. Not selfish. It might have appeared sweet on its face but it was motivated by something reflexive and twitchy, not loving and thankful. 

Venmo culture had come for my very heart.

“It is true that something often comes back when a gift is given, but if this were made an explicit condition of the exchange, it wouldn’t be a gift,” Lewis Hyde writes in, you guessed it: The Gift. “A market exchange has an equilibrium or stasis: you pay to balance the scale. But when you give a gift there is momentum, and the weight shifts from body to body.”

What does it feel like if we allow the natural “momentum” of a gift to run its course? 

It may take months or years to come back around. It may even change shape: someone letting you sleep on their pullout couch could be given back as a tupperware of your famous cheese sauce. 

When we had to bail on a trip earlier this summer, it meant a friend had paid for a stay at a house we wouldn’t be able to go to. I offered to pay our part. He said that I could “get the next one.” We don’t have another trip planned, but it instantly made me feel a giddy warmth to know there was a long loop of this gift, and no expectation of immediate payback while we were navigating something difficult that kept us home that weekend. A We-OU for the future.

If I’m being honest, the immense trust that offer requires also scares me a little. What if that next trip isn’t for a long time? What if there’s a disparity in cost between the two stays? What if we lose touch and I never get to thank him? 

But I want to live in the world of the infinite gift in my relationships more than I want to cling to the transactionality embedded in me from shopping.    

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer describes what would happen if she bought a pair of wool socks at the store – “There is no bond beyond the politely exchanged "thank yous" with the clerk…I don't write a thank-you note to JCPenney.” – and how different the socks become if they were instead knit by her grandmother. “A gift creates ongoing relationship. I will write a thank-you note. I will take good care of them and if I am a very gracious grandchild I'll wear them when she visits even if I don't like them. When its her birthday, I will surely make her a gift in return.”

Something magical happens when we trust in the long loop, in that middle space where we give without expectation and receive without frenetic reciprocity. We’re saying that we love each other enough to simply give. There’s a timescale implied too, one that quietly reassures: we’ll be in each other’s lives for long enough that it will all come back around. Or that we’re okay with it never coming back to us at all, and give just to inspire the delight of more giving. 

If there’s one certainty in this universe, it is that there will be many chances to pay each other back in our friendships and communities. Deaths and illness, losing jobs and moving, breakups and very bad days. There will never be a shortage of opportunities to give to one another. In this world, maybe not instantly giving back is the most loving thing we could do.

or simply click that ₊˚.⋆⁺₊💜₊˚.⋆⁺₊ at the top if you indeed liked it, we always appreciate that here at group hug hq!!

• The legendary Priya Parker has a new quiz about finding your “hosting superpower” – I love this because it focuses on our existing strengths and natural intuition rather than the need to forever upskill to begin somewhere other than where we already are. 

• On the rise of increasingly libidinous run clubs 

• “You’re a ‘liberator’ and you don’t believe in saying hello to people?” This whole tiktok really got me (and also is wild because I have said this verbatim!) I still don’t love conflating “social skills” with whether or not you deserve community and belonging and would love to find more nuance in this but yes, why do we make such a stink about third spaces if we don’t even practice the ways we want to be in the non-work or home spaces we already have? Also “this is one of my hills” is just the best

• My amazing friend Olivia Vagelos is hosting an 8-week virtual experience design retreat this fall called “Designing Experiences for Radical Imagination”. Olivia is one of the most thoughtful experience designers I know; her craft feels like poetry, and this will be an alchemic learning experience for any facilitators, teachers, culture creators, or hosts out there. 

• Heart of Dinner delivers nourishing food and loving, handwritten notes and artwork to Asian American older adults in NYC – such an inspiring example of mutual aid principles at scale

• Can We Create a Pattern Language for Behavioral Design?

• On the paradox of persuasion – “You can’t change hearts and minds unless the people you’re trying to influence actually trust you enough to fully share their stories, including their doubts about their current belief systems.”

• 🎶 In honor of today’s theme, the perfect song from Smog “For the first time in my life / I let myself be held like a big old baby / I surrender to your charity”