Category: Collaboration Zones

Gifting – and the gifting and the gifting economy

Dear friends,

For years I've known people who gave away their professional services as a gift, explicitly encouraging (though not requiring) gifts in return to allow them to continue their work.  I've also loved the idea of “paying it forward” – enjoying as a gift what one has received from others and still giving them money so that people in the future can receive such gifts.

I've also known that the “gift economy” is already a gigantic (though seldom acknowledged) part of the overall economy of the world.  When children come of age they do not receive a bill from their parents for “services rendered”.  Countless home cooked meals, mowed lawns, and love are neither traded nor paid for.  Neighbors and strangers regularly “lend a hand” to each other, donate to causes and volunteer in their communities.  Invisible in the midst of all this, plants pump out oxygen for us, and we exhale carbon dioxide for them, without any dollars moving from hand to leaf or leaf to hand.

For hundreds of thousands of years gift economies have formed the foundation of families, friendships, tribes and communities.  Generosity, kindness, love and gratitude have been the fabric of belonging and the sources of untold abundance.  Reputation and power equity have been guardians of the web of interdependence – relational feedback loops that minimize freeloading and hoarding that can be toxic to community.  As gifts move through the community, its true wealth grows – not only the common wealth of shared resources and mutuality but also the individual wealth of reputation, appreciation and richness of life.

Laid over this profusion of gifting is the logic of exchange – you give me this and I give you that of equal value – and the abstraction we call money that enables us to expand beyond tit-for-tat barter and relationship-bound exchanges.  The less intimacy we have with the people and life around us, the more we need money to ensure proper balance of giving and receiving.  But a shadow of this great gift is that the more we use money, the less intimacy we need with the people and life around us.

Many Links and Posting by Charles Eisenstein on Gift Circles Below the Line.

Continue reading “Tom Atlee: Gifting – and the gifting economy”