Let’s talk about the last favour you did that nobody ever paid back.
Not the big one. Not the loan, not the reference, not the year somebody let you sleep on their couch. The small one. The one that’s still sitting out there, unpaid, unmentioned, almost forgotten by both of you.
There is this moment that used to be completely normal. A bakkie won’t start outside a farm gate. Dead battery, nothing for kilometres. You walk up to the nearest house and knock, and somebody comes out with jumper cables and a working vehicle and no interest whatsoever in being thanked properly. You try to give them money. They wave it off and say something like, jy weet waar ek bly. You know where I live.
That sentence is the entire system. It is not a payment. It is not a receipt. It is a statement that a thread now exists between two people that neither of them is going to cut. And the next time the favour runs the other way, and it will, nobody negotiates terms.
Now run the same broken bakkie through the last decade. You open an app. A stranger with a jump-starter van arrives in twelve minutes. You pay four hundred rand, rate him four point nine stars, and you never speak to him again. He never thinks about you. You never think about him. On every measurable axis, that is a better outcome. Faster, cheaper than losing half a day, no obligation hanging over you.
And that’s the thing worth looking at. Not the convenience. The obligation that isn’t there.
Because the central promise of the last ten years of software has been one thing: settle the account instantly. Instant payment. Instant refund. Instant booking. The subscription that renews itself so you never have to ask anyone for anything. An assistant that pays the bill, files the claim, cancels the policy, while you sleep. Every one of those products is removing the specific human moment where you stand in front of another person and are, for a moment, in their debt.
We call that friction. We’ve been taught to hate friction. But friction was also the thing that made the thread.
Here’s the part we don’t say out loud: trust is not a feeling. Trust is the residue of history. You trust someone because of what already happened between you — and because there is still something open between you that hasn’t been closed out. That’s why you’ll pick up the phone at eleven at night for a person you owe nothing to and everything to. The account is open. The relationship is live.
Money closes the account. That’s the feature, that’s what it’s for, and that’s exactly why the relationships that carry people through bad years are almost never the ones that were settled correctly.
The machine cannot participate in this. Not because it’s cold, not because it’s cruel, but because it has nothing to give that isn’t priced and nothing to forget to repay. It can measure your reliability to three decimal places. It can tell you a stranger has four point nine stars and never once been late. It has no ability to be owed. It has nobody to call at two in the morning, because when the network goes down there is no one on the other side of the favour with a reason to show up.
And here’s the second-order effect nobody’s modelling: when we route the small exchanges through it, the reciprocity loop that used to form between humans stops forming too. Not because anyone stopped them. Because the ask disappeared.
Every automated transaction deletes an ask. And the ask is the doorway. Asking someone for a favour is how a stranger becomes a neighbour; doing one and never collecting is how a neighbour becomes the person you’d lend your bakkie to. Strip the asks out of a life and you can still have a thousand professional contacts and not one call at eleven at night.
Now let me be honest, because this isn’t a case for going back. A lot of those old obligations were cages. The uncle who helped once and never let you forget it for twenty years. The debt inside a family that makes every Christmas a negotiation. Not every unpaid favour is a bond. Some of them are leverage, and the machine is genuinely better than we are at not shaming people about money, which is not a small thing. If you’ve ever been broke in a small town, you know how much damage a favour with strings does.
So the point isn’t nostalgia. The point isn’t cash either — cash is just paper. The point is that a whole invisible layer of human infrastructure is being cleared out of the way as a side effect of efficiency, and nobody is asking whether we wanted it removed.
That layer has no API. No vendor. No dashboard. No pricing page. It cannot be improved by a product team. It is the only trust infrastructure in existence that nobody can shut off, throttle, rate-limit, or charge you a monthly fee to use. Which is probably why it’s the one we’re quietly deleting fastest.
Ask the hard question about the last crisis you had. The car, the diagnosis, the month the cash didn’t come in. Who actually showed up? Now be honest about how many of those people were on a contract, an invoice, or a subscription.
Almost none. The ones who showed up had an open account with you. Some of them from years ago, from a favour nobody wrote down.
And notice you could not have bought that, at any price, on any platform, in any amount of time. You could only have earned it with things you gave away and never invoiced.
The operator’s version of this is blunt. The favours you don’t charge for are your actual moat. The client whose system died at month-end and got two hours of your time for free. The supplier you warned off a bad deal because you’d want the same. The customer you didn’t invoice because it would have been a stupid thing to send a bill for. Every one of those is an open thread in somebody’s ledger.
A competitor can copy your pricing page in an afternoon. They cannot copy four years of unresolved accounts. Procurement can shop your rate. It can’t shop a relationship it doesn’t have.
And the converse matters more: if your business can only be paid, you are a vendor, and vendors get compared on price until they’re gone. If you can be owed, you’re something else. Efficiency optimises away exactly the things that make a business unreplaceable — the slack, the extra mile, the favour you shouldn’t have given. Keep some of that on purpose. It’s not sentiment. It’s positioning.
Personally? Do one stupid thing this month. Ask someone for help you could easily pay for. Not a crisis, not a professional favour, just a small ask of someone who’d have to say yes. It’s inefficient on paper. Most of the things worth having are inefficient on paper.
The machine settles accounts. It’s very good at it, and it will get better every quarter until the whole world clears in real time and nothing is ever outstanding between anyone.
Keep one open anyway. Pick someone this week and leave the account unsettled. Not because it’s polite. Because it’s the last trust infrastructure you own outright, and the day you invoice everything is the day nobody owes you anything.