Gift Economies and Rich Friends

I’ve been thinking, just now ¹ This post was absolutely inspired by a recent CJ The X video (although I was already aware of the concept of gift economies for quite some time). , about gift economies and my friend’s post Rich Friend, Poor Friend.

I think it’s a good post in general, and I think that it’s probably pointing at a real issue some people have, but I don’t think it’s the only thing at play here.

I think that, in addition to wealth, there’s also the factor here of culture.

There are two types ² Inb4 “false dichotomy”: Yeah there are absolutely other potential cultural approaches to this. Please do tell me about them in the comments: I have not researched them. of cultures in play here:

1. There are cultures in which relationships are transactional and you pay people for the difference in value of your interactions, and
2. There are cultures in which differences in value are gifts to be repaid in the future with future gifts - which themselves incur an imbalance which should be likewise repaid in kind.

The former culture is more legible than the latter, but the latter is demonstrably better at forging strong and lasting social bonds.

This is a problem for me, because rationalists and other parts of “they gray tribe” (both important in-groups for me) are definitely in the former group. This is not particularly surprising, given that we tend to prefer more legible social interactions for some reason. ³ Autism. I’m being coy, but the reason is Autism.

If all of my interactions in this culture incur zero social debt on one-another, then I and the person I’m interacting with aren’t building strong social bonds. This is a problem for me, because I like strong social bonds: I want them.

Now, to be fair to Jenn’s post, I think she probably knows that this is a factor. It isn’t mentioned in the post, but I’m quite sure she does know about gift economies, and she does engage in mutual aid. Hell, I think ⁴ I’m lying here: I’m not unsure at all, and this has definitely happened. I’ve even received gifts from her.
Frankly, she’s better at doing this than I am.

For a while now, I and my partners have been choosing not to give eachother gifts for birthdays and Christmas. We find event-obligated gift-giving to be stressful and not worth it. We still give eachother gifts on occasion, but not on specific occasions (and not all that often).

I don’t think that the stress of event-based gifts is worth that trade-off, and I think I’ll continue to not practice that aspect of those holidays when possible, but I do think that I want to make a more intentional effort to give the people in my life gifts when I can. I care about my bonds with my friends and partners, and I want to strengthen them.

So, I want to give more gifts. I want to help the people in my life more often. I want to especially do this for the people I’m closest to and the people who already do this for me. This is me making an intentional statement that I would like to start doing this more, and saying why.

This seems like the sort of thing that is obvious to Allistics ⁵ People who are not Autistic. , and that was just never explained to me because it was assumed that I’d know.

Oops.