What do we owe each other?

and is there a Splitwise for kids?

When my then boyfriend, now husband and I made our first big purchases together, including an indulgently deep-seated cream Crate and Barrel sofa, we added it to a now defunct Splitwise. We giggle at it now, thinking we ever made plans to ‘go Dutch’. Our losses and gains could never be zero sum. But this has been a topic of conversation in our house - what we owe others. Apart from some mildly predatory student loans and some very confusing taxes, we try to keep this balance to a zero. It’s so much more freeing to live in generosity. What do we owe ourselves and each other though? And I mean the collective ‘we’ including friends, families, neighbors, and really just any other human.

The easy question first - what does my son owe me? My first unfiltered inside thought is to say EVERYTHING OK! HE OWES ME EVERYTHING. Nearly 10 months of horrendous pregnancy heartburn and debilitating nausea. 43 hours of labor. And a new pair of underwear whenever I sneeze or cough profusely. Don’t even get me started on postpartum. So yeah, BE OBSESSED WITH ME (in all the ways I want, when I want, please). The least you can do for me is everything.

That’s not how I actually feel, except for the obsessed part obviously. I’m from an Eastern culture where the debts are traditionally collected one way, from the young by the old. The old often used visions of the future to guide their decisions and now prefer the young to look to the past to guide theirs. And I live in a Western culture where the young tend to discard the old, who walk amongst us, now nearly invisible. These days I’m not sure if I’m young or old but I do know I want different for my son. I want him to be unencumbered by the weight of obligation, for it to be replaced by a wealth of gratitude and choice. I want him to pick generosity, though not at his own expense if something is irreplaceable. Of course I want for him to respect, value, and care for all those who have enabled his levity and his privileges, and to appreciate our sacrifices, but, without the guilt. Lord knows we have enough of that. 

This answer of mine also requires a new equilibrium for what’s going on one layer deeper - what we owe each other, all of us, and how we draw our community boundaries. I’m not going to glorify the past but I do feel like something in our ethos has dramatically shifted. I feel it more so than ever in the dumpster fire that has been America’s 2024. There are logical answers to the question of when this happened - seeds and weeds have been seasonally planted, prioritizing individual gains, and they’ve taken root. But I’m more interested in what it really takes to first see yourself in another, and then to truly believe that we owe something to not just the reflection. Right now, it feels like our community well is so drained, the water table has fallen.

Many months ago, when global events were already horrific and hard to process (there is no adjective sufficient for what they are now), I listened to an episode of the Ezra Klein podcast featuring Rabbi Sharon Braus. There were parts of it that were beautiful and meaningful to me. Below are some of them.

The research…[..].is quite extraordinary…[..].it shows that the deeper our tribal connections, the weaker our connections to those outside our tribe. And what I’m actually asking of myself and of us is that we strengthen our tribal attachment at the same time that we strengthen our universal attachment.

Ultimately, the problem of the world is that we draw the circle of our family too small. And we know the pain of the worlds drawing the circle of their family small enough that it excludes us. We must not exclude others ultimately.

What we have to do is expand our scope of moral concern to find the humanity in one another again. That is the call of our time.

Telling the truth, very simply, is essential to healing. We must tell the truth about what is happening, where we are, and how we got here. All diagnosticians must take a serious effort to set aside our cognitive biases and see what is truly before us, rather than what our implicit bias orients us toward.

Many of us have spent years trying not to look. We don’t know because we don’t want to know….[…] because accepting the reality of suffering means accepting that people can be not only victims but victimizers.

It endangers our democracy when we’re unable to actually engage one another’s pain because we feel that our cause is so righteous.

I’ve removed specific parties from the quote above, because I think the overall point I’m trying to make here is broad (the episode with all its specifics is also worth listening to). I’m connecting these moments in time to arrive at this very simple conclusion that we owe each other more, so much more. Our interpersonal deficit is so high we’re basically a proxy for the US government (fun fact: the 2024 deficit clocks in at $1.6 trillion). How apropos. We are also placing too high a premium on what our progeny owes us. If we were to raise the baseline amongst everyone though, I’m certain our kids would follow suit. They would also organically pass it back to us, back to themselves even. If everyone had multiple sources from which to drawdown from, maybe there would be a little less hoarding for ‘me and mine’ alone. And it’s also not just about the kids, or about the very real causes that need our action-oriented activism right now. It’s also about that warm fuzzy feeling when someone surprises us with a thoughtful follow-up question, because they’ve taken a moment to really listen and consider us.

Consideration. I think that’s what we owe each other. To actually consider another as part of the equation that includes time, effort, advocacy. To know our fates are undeniably connected, to see them even when they’re not in our line of sight. I imagine it’s similar to the way I’d picture my feet descending stairs when I was nine months pregnant - I’d have to make the effort to think of where they were placed or else we’d all go tumbling down. (What Oprah is to cars, I am to metaphors). And what do we owe to ourselves? Well, I think there’s actually only one thing we owe ourselves - grace. Grace offsets all manner of sins. Everything else is gravy. A soul sister friend recently commented that it was only once she sat with the “flailing, failing, devastating” reality of her own human experience, and let go of trying to maintain her own perfectionism, could she access and hold space to really see others. As the kids say (or once did, what do I know), that hits different.

I’m working on how it all translates to the everyday. It likely starts with reflecting on our values and who gets to experience them in practice. It could be evaluating how, why, and where we draw our circles of consideration. It could be about silencing your inner critic long enough to hear someone else’s. It could be checking on someone in the midst of your own chaos because you’ve remembered an old Whatsapp volley gone silent¹. It might even be as straightforward as taking a quick beat before saying or doing something of external consequence. I haven’t always been very good at that, I love the dopamine of now. But I’ve learned wellbeing clusters into two main domains; hedonic wellbeing (what feels good) and eudaemonic wellbeing (what is meaningful). So maybe the answer lies in shifting the balance between the two.

As for my baby boy, I hope he draw his family circles wide, and that he finds himself in innumerable others’. That he is able to answer this call of our time to see the humanity in everyone. I’ll be there to collect hugs and kisses and weirdly loud sniffs of his hair, but he won’t owe me his choices. All I ask is to have a dedicated shrine in every room of his house for all eternity, easy peasy.

1. Separate but related, here’s an interesting piece from Rosie Spinks that recently went viral on the topic of friendships.

ICYMI: career guilt | where are you from | mama uses good words and bad | do you have to know sorrow to know kindness | captain’s log

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