Unearned

Words By Shanti Mathias | She/Her

Someone I love has his rules for life inscribed in neat handwriting above his desk. "Never say anything that will cause permanent pain" is one. "Always try your best" is another. While I agree with many of his rules, one is something I disagree with: "earn what you are given," it says.

The pandemic has not ended, but here, facing twelve more weeks of university, and all that comes afterwards, it has receded to the background a bit. My life is normal, really, and I am thankful that I can study and run around seeing my friends, and stay up late talking to people and drinking wine my flatmate gave me.

I have not earned this. 

We have not earned this. 

I have been given citizenship of a country with relatively good governance. I have been given a stable and supportive family. I have been given a warm and dry flat. If I start telling myself that I have these things because I have earned them, then perhaps I will start believing the inverse: that the people who have lost their jobs, live in countries with science-denying leaders, and live in damp flats are somehow less deserving than me. 

In this moment—in the emptiness, in the new start of each trimester but especially this trimester, in the same-as-before-but-also-different—I feel a need for an urgent generosity. I want to cultivate a practice of generosity: giving to those who have not earned anything, knowing that I am given so much I have not earned. 

Here is an incomplete list of kindnesses I have received in the last month: a friend’s mum invited me to her house in Picton, although I hadn’t met her before. She gave me chocolate cake to eat on the bus.  A friend bought me hummus as a study snack. A waitress told me that my bus was leaving. A friend of a friend gave me a ride home in the rain. I was looking slightly morose and one of my flatmates offered me a hug. Another friend made me muffins, even though she was in the middle of moving house, and spent an hour talking to me.  

Receiving generosity is awkward. Pleasantries don’t walk. "Oh you shouldn’t have," I could say: but they have done it anyway, and I am so thankful. "I didn’t need that," I could say: but I have been given nonetheless. Generosity is, by definition, unasked for and unneeded: there’s something a bit radical to going over the top, doing more than the bare minimum, noticing what someone wants, and not just what they need. I try to say thank you as sincerely as possible and trust that the other person will know it is enough.

Generosity is important. It is an affirmation that people are valuable not because of what they can do or who they are, but just because they’re people. Of course, things I get for achieving something—a thank you gift for doing some writing for someone else, a meal paid for because someone owes me a favour—are things I appreciate. There’s something deeply affirming in being able to receive something I could never earn. 

Marcel Mauss, a famous anthropologist (much debated now of course, because anthropologists' favourite topic of critique is themselves) has a concept of the gift economy. Around you are the people who you give things to with the expectation of an ongoing relationship rather than something of the same value back: children, close friends. You would willingly host all their birthday parties, and buy them a present besides. Next are the people who you want something reciprocal from: friends, acquaintances, colleagues. If they invite you to their birthday party, you invite them to yours, even if you don’t know them that well. In the circle beyond that are people who take things from you without offering any compensation. They gatecrash your birthday and steal a bottle of gin on the way out. The people beyond that are those with whom you have no relationship. (Apologies to my hardworking anthropology lecturers for this drastic oversimplification). 

Generosity is a way to look at people that goes beyond diagrams of reciprocity. It’s a practice of learning not to expect anything back from the person in the lecture who needs a pen or notes, from the friend who could do with a hug or you buying them coffee, from the next-door neighbour who could do with some fresh produce. Generosity is a practice of attention, and a way to act against the individualization, the longing to handle it on your own, that is so easy. I have a lot to learn about generosity, and I hope to get better at giving and receiving all I cannot earn. 

I feel so helpless against the new and old problems of the pandemic, the way case numbers reduce people to statistics, the electric unfairness of the powerful people staying safe and wealthy while so many others have their stability wrenched from underneath them. And yet there is nothing I can do about The Economy and The Politicians and The Society and The Rental Market and The University Management and all the ways that these individual institutions are failing the people within them.
I can be generous.