I've seen this a lot in my life. People who are never going to be hungry or will never end up homeless treat the prospect of giving anyone else any amount of money as if it would bankrupt them. People in your life who are poor or have been poor, will just help you
had a friend of a friend offer me and my two friends a slice of pizza. before we could even finish bro pulled out the calculator app on his iphone 15 to determine we all needed to add him on venmo to send 94 cents each. next time i saw him he talked about taking cruise ships every summer
I try not to be that guy, but I have a lot of friends like this (will literally venmo charge you in the moment). It just makes the relationship feel transactional.
I was trying to get rid of an old nes a year or so ago and offered it to a coworker, he asked how much I wanted for it and I just told him to buy me lunch some time.
Months go by and I've totally forgotten and we're getting lunch and he's like "nah this one is on me for the NES".
I hate venmo culture so much, just have vague favors and stop counting the pennies for the love of god.
i've seen a couple posts about this phenomena before and every time i check the comments there's people going "that's how they stay rich!" as if pocket change gave them their lake house 😭
the fact all these mfs PAY MONTHLY FOR TWITTER while emphasizing penny pinching is fucking hilarious (2nd/3rd just have the checkmark hidden, you gotta scroll past every blue to get the normal users)
I have a hard time convincing people not to pay me back to the point where I actually get really annoyed. Constant unending "oooh i can't accept blah for free blah blah blah must pay you back blah blah" SHUT UP SHUT UP
You can see this along countries and cultures too; westerners are usually way more stingy than people in the global south. Middle Easterners, North Africans, South Asians, Latin Americans, etc. will constantly try to do favors for family, friends, acquaintances. Muslims will randomly offer and insist on giving people free gifts or food. I've heard Swedish people tell guests to wait in the other room while their family eats dinner.
I'm the failure in my friend group, they're all highly paid software engineers and I'm a POS factory schmuck. But I have both experiences between a few of them. One of them is cheap as shit, made his wife deal with a broken graphics card where the screen kept going black in the middle of playing for years, while my other friend keeps buying me games he wants me to play with him so I reciprocate when there's one I want him to play lol
I guess the silver lining is that more people seem to be starting to realize those guys are evil insufferable pricks. Basically all my life before now, the narrative would have been twisted with "no, see, he's *frugal and those behaviors are why he's rich and everyone else should emulate this"
I literally have the opposite problem with my mates. I feel that I'm two dinners in debt to them, but they'll still insist on getting the next one because I paid last time, or something.
idk how I feel about this, it's definitely not this cut-and-dried – it's situational but I've both been the friend who says no worries over coffee or food or whatever and the friend who says "hey pls pay me back the $30-50 for [movie/concert tickets, pricy thing we went in on together, etc.], thanks". but I'm also very much on the low end of income for software engineering (below six figures) and providing for a disabled spouse, which has me (probably unnecessarily) always at least low-grade stressed about money.
Im very generous with my money and resources, I just did something cool for my friends on Friday but my friends should want to help me pay for shit. I really dont want mooch friends.
I am very ok with the vague favours regime of debt, but I also know some very generous people who have been taken advantage of too much so that they insist on paying back their debts.
Also remember my broke-ass mum basically fighting with my aunt every time it was time to pay (for the privelige of paying) for gas money.