The invisible exchange

Happy March to my sweet creatures on Earth whom I love and cherish. This is a special month for me because it marks two years of writing this blog.

If you’ve been reading along, especially for all of you who’ve messaged, shared your thoughts, and discussed these essays with me –– thank you ❤️ Everytime that happens, my brain short-circuits in the nicest way possible. I’ve invested hours, tears, and a lot of heart into many of these essays, and having that recognized makes it all feel worthwhile. Like maybe I’m not just screaming into the void while the void checks its phone.

This essay has been swirling around in my brain pretty much since the start of 2025. Unlike most of my essays that dive into a lot of personal stuff, this one is just a collection of musings about a subject that comes up ridiculously often in my writing.

Reciprocity.

The term itself—rEciPR0ciTy—feels weirdly formal for something so fundamental to human interaction. 

Since I absolutely abhor explaining what words mean using dictionary definitions (why explain something in 8 words when you can use 3000), let’s start here: Reciprocity basically means I scratch your back, you scratch mine.

But it takes things a step further. Reciprocity acknowledges that it’s worth pushing through the discomfort of scratching someone else’s back BECAUSE society at large benefits from humans not having itchy backs. We’re better off that way.

Now I know when you think of reciprocity, the first thing that comes to mind is friendships, relationship dynamics, stuff like that. In my writing on reciprocity, that’s been my go-to angle as well. I’ve written about it in this essay called You Might Actually Need People. I’ve written not one but two separate pieces specifically dissecting how reciprocity shapes friendships (here and here). I’ve written about how it applies to us replying to messages, taking a compliment, and apologizing.

The question that’s really been gnawing at me is this: What exactly do we owe each other? I’ve noticed a lot more conversations popping up around this subject lately. Maybe it’s because, during the pandemic, we spent so long perfecting the art of isolating ourselves and prioritizing our immediate needs. At the time, it made sense—we were protecting each other by distancing ourselves.

But five years later, I think we’ve forgotten how to reverse that. We’ve swung from sacrificing comfort for collective good, back toward prioritizing personal convenience at the expense of community.

It’s become a cultural meme: The anxious-calculus of inconvenience. Who deserves to inconvenience me? What inconveniences will I allow into my life? And who am I willing to inconvenience, and under what conditions?

These questions signal how badly we have lost sight of the fact that we are communal creatures who depend on each other and, to some degree, owe a certain level of respect or reciprocity to each other. 

I realize how preachy and predictable this critique sounds at face value. But when you push beyond the obvious, neat conclusions, things quickly get more interesting.

Relationships and reciprocity

Recently, a friend and I were talking about reciprocity in the messy mud-pile of online dating, which is frankly a pretty good place to start if you’re in the mood to lose faith in humanity.

Specifically, I asked her how she managed to sidestep the nagging sense of entitlement we sometimes feel toward communication or an explanation for someone’s poor behavior. After talking to someone everyday for a week or a month even, is it reasonable to be angry and upset if they ghost you?

Let’s take it a step further. What happens if you go on a few amazing dates with them, or sleep with them? In a typical online dating scenario, none of that stuff is a binding contract. Yet, some part of us instinctively feels entitled to reassurance, or at the very least, clarity. We need clear endings instead of mysterious fades into nothingness. But lately, I’m less convinced that we’re owed this.

Online dating has, in a sense, encouraged surface level relationships that forfeit their rights to expectations. The rules are different now. The terms of engagement have shifted. Ghosting someone isn’t considered a moral felony anymore. Everyone acknowledges it’s not ideal, but we’ve collectively decided to tolerate it. Like jaywalking or something.

Perhaps in a perfect world we would always know people’s intentions and have explanations for when they upset us. But that is frankly unrealistic. A lack of reciprocity can be allowed to exist, whether it hurts your feelings or not. 

Of course, as relationships deepen, the reciprocity stakes rise dramatically. It’s entirely reasonable (healthy, even) to expect more clarity and mutuality once you’ve established genuine emotional bonds. 

But even in these deeper relationships, reciprocity isn’t guaranteed. People change their minds. Feelings fade, often suddenly and without warning. Just because someone’s actions devastate you doesn’t automatically mean they’ve done something morally wrong.

In other words, heartbreak doesn’t always involve a bad guy. This is deeply unsatisfying because our emotional logic tends to run something like this: “You hurt me. Therefore, you must be BAD. You have done something wrong.”

The uncomfortable truth is that you can experience profound hurt without anyone actually being at fault. But how can something hurt so badly if nobody did anything wrong? Our minds struggle with this contradiction, but understanding it seems essential to emotional maturity. I’m still at the early stages of acceptance here.

People arrive at relationships with vastly different emotional capacities, communication preferences, and life experiences. One person might effortlessly pour out their soul after a few meaningful meetings, someone else might take ages to articulate anything that truly matters to them.

The question then isn’t “Are we each giving exactly the same?” but rather, “Are we both giving what makes sense for who we are and what we have?” These disparities don’t automatically signal reciprocity failure. Sometimes they’re just evidence of human diversity in emotional processing and expression.

Balancing the invisible scales

That difference nudges us toward an important distinction: the gap between equal and equitable reciprocity. Equal reciprocity asks for matching contributions, like two siblings carefully splitting their chocolate bar. Equitable reciprocity, on the other hand, recognizes and adjusts for differences in resources, emotional bandwidth, and circumstances.

For my husband and I, or any parents for that matter, this is common sense stuff. From the outside, our division of labor might look completely lopsided. For a year and a half, I was the only one who could breastfeed our child. I’d be waking up 3 or 4 times a night while he slept. There was no “equal” way to split that biological reality.

So while I was the designated milk dispenser, my husband took over other duties if I needed to sleep in, and made sure I had moments to myself when I desperately needed them. The math won’t add up evenly on paper. It never does. But we found our own equilibrium through constant recalibration.

Some weeks he carried more weight, other weeks I did. What mattered was the mutual recognition that we were both investing in the same project (our family) even when the contributions looked wildly different. The reciprocity exists in the shared commitment to pick up what the other person can’t carry. And in healthy families, nobody’s keeping score.

Equitable reciprocity creates its own challenges, though. Without clear metrics, how do we know when the balance tips too far? How do we prevent flexibility from becoming exploitation? There’s no spreadsheet for measuring emotional exchanges. We’re navigating by feel in foggy conditions.

In my own house, this means sometimes having uncomfortable conversations about imbalance. “I feel like I’ve been carrying too much lately” is a phrase we’ve both had to learn to say without defensiveness. It’s simply a request to recalibratie. Sometimes we don’t even notice the scales have tipped until the other person points it out.

This is why reciprocity requires constant attention and adjustment rather than one-time agreements. And I think, most importantly, it all comes down to a sense of trust. Not just trust in the person, trust in the process. You have to trust that these imbalances might eventually even out over the long arc of a relationship, even if they look wildly off in any given moment.

It helps to remember that it’s a long, long life, my friends.

Reciprocity and society

Dating and relationships get all the attention when we talk about reciprocity, but lately I’ve been thinking about how reciprocity works when nobody’s trying to impress anyone they might sleep with.

How does reciprocity work in the context of libraries? By modern logic, public libraries shouldn’t exist. You borrow something valuable, for free, and you’re expected to return it later for someone you’ll never meet. No contracts, no deposits, just a vague sense of communal obligation.

Returning a library book doesn’t benefit whoever loaned it to you — it helps the next reader. You’ll never meet them. They’ll never thank you. It’s entirely voluntary, totally irrational from a capitalist perspective, and yet public libraries still work. Not perfectly, but they do.

So do they really work on pure goodwill? That’s the convenient story we tell ourselves. The reality is obviously more complicated. Libraries function because they’ve created systems that make cooperation easier than defection. Late fees, the inability to check out more books until you return the ones you have, the social embarrassment of having an account flagged—these aren’t exactly pure trust and reciprocity at work.

Maybe that’s the point, though. I think at a societal or structural level, functional reciprocity is about creating systems resilient enough to absorb the inevitable defections without collapsing entirely.

In Goa, I see subtle examples of this indirect reciprocity. Like at beaches. Nobody personally benefits from cleaning their own garbage. They’ve already enjoyed their day at the beach, they won’t directly meet the next visitors. But most people still pick up after themselves. Is it because of the simple “Please Keep Our Beaches Clean” signs or the pressure of not wanting to be that person?

But as we all know, this system breaks down regularly. Anyone who’s visited a popular beach after a holiday weekend knows that collective responsibility has serious limits. When crowds reach a certain size, when people feel anonymous enough, when one person leaves trash and creates a broken windows effect. “One wrapper won’t matter” multiplied by thousands creates a beach buried in trash.

Without formal rules, reciprocity appears organically, but it’s fragile: We all want things to be tidy right? So keep things tidy, trust others to do the same. We’re conditional cooperators –– we’ll contribute to the communal good only if we believe others are doing the same.

So we need a balance of trust, monitoring, shame, and proportional response to violations. Too much enforcement, and you kill the spirit of voluntary cooperation. Too little, and the system collapses under the weight of free-riders. ‘Why should I bother if they don’t?’ becomes the battle cry of reciprocity breakdown.

What looks like natural reciprocity is actually the result of invisible social infrastructure that we’ve built over generations. The question isn’t whether humans are naturally cooperative or selfish, we’re clearly both, depending on context. The question is what conditions make reciprocity more likely to emerge and persist.

I think the most fascinating question here isn’t why reciprocity occasionally fails, but why it ever works at all, given how strange we all are.

Reciprocity and market forces

Our economy runs on reciprocity too, but on the surface, it’s the tidy, sanitized kind. I hand you cash, you hand me something useful, we nod politely, and we’re done. No lingering obligations, no awkward follow-up texts, and definitely no feelings involved. It’s neat and rational. Basically, everything humans aren’t.

But here’s the problem: this tidy economic reciprocity has a huge blind spot. It doesn’t care about anyone outside the immediate exchange.

When I buy a dress online that costs 500 bucks, the exchange feels perfectly fair—I pay money, I get clothing. But behind this clean interaction is a messy bunch of stuff we’d prefer not to think about: Garment workers laboring in bad conditions, ecosystems disrupted by pollution, and communities facing impacts from factories they never consented to hosting.

These are all forms of reciprocity failures at scale. When companies dump toxic chemicals into rivers during manufacturing, local residents pay the price despite never agreeing to the bargain. The immediate reciprocity between company and consumer balances perfectly, but everyone else gets quietly shafted.

Our global economy thrives precisely because we’ve become brilliant at separating cause and effect, extracting resources in one place, consuming in another, and leaving consequences for people we’ll never meet.

Sometimes I shudder to think that the plastic toys my daughter plays with might be around longer than her AND her grandkids. The most profound reciprocity failures are the ones where we’re taking from people who don’t even exist yet. People who have no way to negotiate better terms.

And I get the counterargument: Markets create accountability through consumer choice!!!! If people care about these issues, they’ll shop elsewhere. And there’s some truth to this perspective. 

Consumer activism has pushed us toward more sustainable practices. Fair trade certifications, thrift shopping, and just consciously consuming LESS –– all that is happening because some people have decided to factor these broader reciprocity concerns into their purchasing decisions.

You could also argue that by regulating externalities, you’re simply driving up costs and eventually hurting the very communities that need economic development most. A garment factory with imperfect labor conditions might still provide income for families that don’t have many other alternatives.

These are valid points that complicate my neat narrative about market failures. But they don’t entirely fix the fundamental disconnect: Our economic system is GREAT at measuring direct exchange value but it SUX at accounting for indirect impacts.

Even the most intentional, nitpicky consumer can’t possibly track all the ripple effects of their purchases. The information asymmetry is too vast, the supply chains are too complex, the cookie is too crumbly.

Economists call these consequences “externalities,” probably because it sounds less alarming than “things we decided to ignore.”

The art of not being a jerk

So we’ve established that at face value, reciprocity follows a simple exchange: I help you, you help me. But real life complicates things quickly. If you’ve ever lived with roommates, you’ll know that a conversation about splitting chores is inevitable.

In theory, everyone should do their share because clean common spaces benefit everyone. In practice, you find yourself glaring at someone who never notices a sink full of dirty dishes but always has time for a Netflix binge.

To make sense of this messy human habit of not cooperating even when it’s obviously beneficial, some smart people came up with a concept called the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a classic puzzle in game theory.

Here’s how it goes: Imagine two people accused of robbing a bank. The police interrogate them separately and give each person two choices: stay quiet (cooperate with their accomplice), or snitch (defect). If both stay quiet, they’ll each get a slap on the wrist.

If one betrays the other, the snitch walks free while the other gets slammed with serious jail time. If they both snitch, they both end up serving moderate sentences.

Rationally, the smartest move is always to betray, because no matter what your accomplice does, snitching guarantees you avoid the absolute worst outcome. But when both people follow this logic, everyone loses.

This explains everything from why your household chores never seem fairly distributed to why global climate agreements keep falling apart. Individually rational decisions often create collective disasters.

But luckily for humanity, real life rarely consists of single-shot interactions like our poor hypothetical prisoners. We have families, coworkers, neighbors—people we repeatedly interact with, which changes the game dramatically.

Robert Axelrod, a political scientist with too much time on his hands, once organized a tournament of different Prisoner’s Dilemma strategies, testing how they’d perform if games repeated indefinitely.

The winner wasn’t a complex, genius, cunning algorithm. It was precious and simple: Tit for Tat. It boiled down to four obvious yet powerful principles that I think can form the basis of all human reciprocity.

1. Start nice: Always begin by cooperating. Basically, assume the best until proven otherwise. In social terms, this means extending trust first rather than approaching relationships with suspicion. Communities where people generally assume good intentions tend to flourish more than those dominated by distrust.
   
2. Respond proportionally: If someone screws you over, gently let them know it wasn’t cool. This doesn’t mean vengeful overreaction, just a proportional response that establishes boundaries. In everyday life, this might mean directly addressing when someone takes advantage of your generosity rather than silently accepting it.
   
3. Forgive quickly: After making your point, immediately return to cooperation. Holding grudges only perpetuates conflict cycles. Communities that practice restorative rather than purely punitive approaches tend to maintain stronger social bonds.
   
4. Be predictable: Keep your reactions consistent enough that people trust how you’ll respond. Spontaneity is great on vacations, less so in social contracts.

The cool thing is that even in groups full of people acting purely from self-interest, simple cooperation won. Tit for Tat doesn’t beat selfishness head-to-head in every single interaction, but over time, cooperation creates enough collective benefit so that everyone ends up better off.

Now if you read those four principles and thought: Hey this is usually how I do things. I’m kind, I’m generally not a pushover. I have boundaries, and I’ve forgiven people I care about. I’ve consistently done this over time. So why do some of my relationships suck?

How do I account for things going wrong even when BOTH parties seem to be following a tit-for-tat operational model?

Fortunately for us, AGAIN, Axelrod has answers.

There’s a crucial human factor these tidy simulations initially missed: mistakes and misunderstandings.

Your friend flakes on a few hangouts or says something thoughtless, and suddenly you’re convinced they hate you. Or you hear something from someone about something that may or may not have been said about you and in just an instant, everything shifts.

When researchers added this kind of noise to their simulations, strict Tit for Tat strategies tended to spiral (just like us) into endless cycles of mutual retaliation over misunderstandings. It basically became a version of: We’re fighting but we don’t remember what started it.

Fortunately for all of us YET AGAIN, Axelrod found a solution to this: Slightly more generous forgiveness.

He called it “Generous Tit for Tat” (proving yet again that academics shouldn’t be allowed to name things). In practice, this meant occasionally letting minor annoyances slide. Strategic forgetfulness to stop resentment spirals before they even begin.

It’s easy (and tempting) to get fixated on tracking exactly who owes what. But true reciprocity doesn’t thrive when you’re keeping meticulous scorecards. Instead, it flourishes in spaces where generosity feels natural.

I think after reading about the Prisoner’s Dilemma and this whole tit for tat thing, I’ve realized that the best thing you can do is create an environment where cooperation feels normal and safe. Because it turns out we’re actually pretty good at this reciprocity thing, as long as we’re given just enough breathing room to occasionally mess it up.

Chalo, so what now?

If I’m honest, part of why I’ve spent so much time thinking (okay, obsessing) about reciprocity is that I haven’t always been great at it myself. I’ve felt hurt when friends failed to reciprocate my attention, leaving me embarrassed over texts sent. I’ve been upset when someone’s lack of reciprocity felt personal—even if it probably wasn’t.

And yet, I’ve done the exact same thing to others. Missed messages, lack of concern, and overlooked bids for connection. I don’t have any moral high ground here. Reciprocity is humbling precisely because it demands we acknowledge both roles: We’re simultaneously hurt and hurtful, generous and selfish.

That’s the trouble with believing you “reap what you sow.” The metaphor breaks down when you’re dealing with actual humans. You can do everything right, be patient and generous and attentive, and STILL watch your efforts get flushed down the toilet. It’s happened to people I care about, and it’s happened to me more times than I’d like to admit. 

When I first sat down to write this essay, I was half-expecting to arrive at some clarity for myself and my own struggles with unmet expectations. I was hoping to write my way into some peace of mind and heart, but that hasn’t happened. The more I thought, wrote, and deleted, the clearer it became that reciprocity refuses to behave itself. It squirms out of our tidy definitions, leaving more questions than answers.

So back to the original question: What exactly do we owe each other? The idea that we owe each other anything at all is both reassuring and terrifying. It’s reassuring because reciprocity suggests our small acts of kindness and generosity aren’t meaningless after all. And terrifying because it demands something from us, but we’re never fully sure what that is, or exactly how much. Kinda like doing taxes.

I think reciprocity sticks around precisely because it holds together so many fragile parts of our lives. Friendships, relationships, communities –– without ever quite guaranteeing anything. It demands trust from us, even when there’s no clear reason to offer it.

But we continue to invest in these small acts of everyday faith, quietly hoping everyone else will too, simply because the alternative seems painfully bleak. I still can’t clearly answer the question of what we owe each other because reciprocity doesn’t come down to fairness. I think where I’m at now is this: Reciprocity is about deciding what kind of world we want to live in, and then acting like it’s already here.

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