i hate splitwise. i hate venmo. more precisely, i hate the way that these apps have dug themselves into our social patterns.

my impression is that a lot of ppl feel an impulsive need to return favors, to balance their side of the checkbook of obligations — and that, in a well-functioning network of friendships, that happens by-default, without anyone ever realizing it. at that point, the impulsive need fades away, because you’re constantly doing things that build the commons, that others are probabilistically going to benefit from. to the extent that one’s community doesn’t look like that, one should take actions in the direction of that state. this is particularly true for services which pay in a currency which has a more hazy exchange rate to other currencies, like “helping someone through a breakup” or “fixing someone’s tech problems.”

i do think there can be a pattern of behavior that causes alice to go deeply into the red without bob’s being aware, because bob wants to view his friendship not as a ledger of obligation. typically, we call this failure mode “taking advantage of someone.” this is bad, for obvious reasons — but i think there are ways of preventing this that don’t look like “keep track of every venmo,” that people often myopically ignore.

originally this was titled “friendships aren’t a ledger of obligation,” but i like this title better. i’m making a normative claim, and i’m not making the claim that they can’t be ledgers of obligation (in fact, i’d make the opposite claim, having thought about it more!), but that seeing them through that lens is harmful/toxic/self-effacing/indicative of something else going wrong. after all:

• friendships totally are ledgers of obligation
• however, if you see your friendships that way, something is going wrong
• you should seek to fix those things which are going wrong, such that you end up not seeing friendships as ledgers of obligation

todo:

• turn “i should return that favor” into “i want to be in the types of relationships and be the type of person that would do the sorts of things for my friends that they do for me”
• i definitely hold myself to a significantly higher standard here than i do others
  • as in, if i notice myself seeing friendships as ledgers of obligation, i’m much more “something’s wrong” than i am if others are seeing a friendship as a ledger of obligation
  • and also, that i (would like to be someone who) ignores times when others owe me $5 or smth, and pays attn when i owe others $5 — rather than to ignore when i owe others $5 and pay attn when others owe me $5
• caveat — doing this trades lower variance (”getting paid back for every single thing”) for lower transaction costs (”not needing to figure every thing out”). taking on more variance might not be a good thing