Growing up as a young (fine) man, people offered me money a lot.
Sometimes as gifts, for friendship, or relationships. Sometimes for sex or just to have access to me.
But I learned early that free things are rarely free.
When people give you something, even when they don’t say it, there is usually an invisible debt attached. You start owing them time, attention, friendship, companionship, loyalty, or access you may not even want to give.
I hated that position because I like to choose my friends and relationships on my own terms.
There’s a line in David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years that stayed with me:
“By gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.”
It explains how both can be forms of control. One is just quieter.
Even as a young man, I understood that the giver and the receiver are on two completely different trajectories.
The giver is forced to earn, produce, and create value.
The habitual receiver learns to wait, depend, and slowly become whatever keeps the giver interested.
At some point, you have to release yourself from the take mentality because the longer you live only to receive, the more you train yourself to wait instead of build.
The moment I started earning more, I gave more. I did giveaways here. I paid hospital bills. I even handed my shoe business over to my sales girl. And each time I gave, I earned more.
Refusing free money, rejecting transactional intimacy, and choosing the harder road of becoming the person who could give is the mindset shift that changed my life.