If You Use Venmo the Good Way, Your Life Will Improve

Perhaps the most bewildering quality of adulthood is that even when you’re feeling like the most godawful sad piece of shit, you’re still expected to work. Meeting invites demand your immediate confirmation, bloated email threads require your input, deadlines aren’t pushed back. All the while, your existential crises and personal issues thrum on, the sound of your own negative thought spirals getting louder and more distracting until they crescendo into a deafening—

At which point you attempt to slay your sadness by sending a text to your closest friends. “god i am having the worst day,” you say. “ugh i’m sorry,” they reply. This tossed-off sympathy is inadequate, but it will have to suffice for now. You set your phone down and pray the pressure valve controlling your tearflow has relaxed just enough that you don’t get misty during Dave’s quarterly metrics meeting.

I was enduring one of those torturous days—in the throes of a personal crisis (a breakup)—when my friend Shaun responded to my SOS SMS not with knee-jerk heart emoji but via Venmo. He sent me $0.25 with a note: “Use this money to purchase a temporary tattoo.” Is 25 cents even enough money to cover the cheapest fake tattoo? It didn’t matter. It was 2014, and the exchange marked the first time someone in my life had used Venmo for charitable, as opposed to debt-leveling, purposes. Venmo, I realized, could be Good.

Of course, Venmo has always been lowercase-g good. The mobile payment service made paying for bachelor(ette) weekends and large group dinner bills so seamless that some of us actually attend people’s birthdays now. Splitting utilities with your roommates no longer involves writing checks, or even writing at all. Venmo has pre-populated emojis for many typical payment exchanges—how delightful. It’s hard to remember life before Venmo. But keeping your tabs paid, while useful, can make friendships feel less generous. With Venmo available, can you assume your friend is buying the round, or will they expect to be paid back? Nobody wants to be hit with an unexpected $8 Venmo request while on their cab ride home from the bar. Total vibe kill.

The questionable code of conduct that cropped up around Venmo has been well documented. “Venmo Is Turning Our Friends Into Petty Jerks,” Quartz wrote. “Thanks to Venmo, We Now All Know How Cheap Our Friends Are” was the New York Times take. While everyone found some time to blame Venmo for our stingier instincts, though, most lacked the guts to look their friends in the eyes and say, “Stop that, it’s really lame and honestly borderline sociopathic!” We created this mess. But there’s still a chance for each and every one of us to do a Good Venmo, one that will make all your most online friends say, “You love to see it!”

Shaun’s Good Venmo was mostly meant to make me laugh on a bad day. But it also provided me with a mission. Later that day my roommate and I decided to go on a hunt through Brooklyn for a temporary tattoo vending machine, spurred on by the idea that the best way to repay Shaun would be to double down on the joke. We ended up at a Key Foods in Park Slope, joyfully applying flaming skulls to each other’s backs in the parking lot. I’ve spent the last five years since then adopting Venmo as my love language, attempting to infuse that same joy into the lives of my friends by sending them small amounts of money in their times of heartache and need.

Consider this: There are no rules against sending your friends money. Some people might find it “weird” or “creepy,” but that’s more about their ability to accept love from others than it is about you. You don’t have to send them much. I’m not suggesting you gift them $20 for no reason. (There is, in fact, a rule about giving people $20 specifically: It should only be given in crisp bill form, tucked within a flowery Hallmark card whose cover reads “To a special granddaughter on her birthday.” Do not break this rule and upset the universe.) But if you’re still confused, allow me to help. With years of practice, I’ve developed a pretty good rubric for how to do a Good Venmo.

The altruistic Venmo sweet spot is anywhere from $3 to $7. (There’s a different Venmo practice known as “penny poking” where users request or send pennies to each other to say “hi.” The altruistic Venmo is meant to serve a purpose beyond the notification.) The point is to give your friend a specific designation for the money. Maybe your friend loves lattes or a specific type of cheese from Trader Joe’s. Maybe you two have an inside joke about Orbit gum. Whatever it is, it should feel like a treat, not an insult to your friend’s bank account. Which brings me to my next point.

Most of us don’t need the charity. We could buy ourselves the latte or gum. What we need, in our moments of despair, is for someone else to remind us of the things that make us happy, and gently insist we take the time to experience those things. This is about giving your sad friends permission to take a small reprieve from their shitty days. When I send my friends a few dollars on Venmo, what I’m really saying is: “I am so sorry your day is so shitty, and I wish I could give you a hug and bring you a cookie. But I can’t because I also have to be at my job. So instead I want you to leave your godforsaken office and go get yourself a cookie because you deserve it.”

Just like that, your friend is touched and you are a hero. Booyah, baby! But wait, this is where I let you in on a teensy little secret. Whispering: Sending my friends money on Venmo is just as much for me as it is for them. Doing nice things for people I deeply cherish also makes me feel good. I know it sounds messed up and possibly illegal, but again, I checked and there are no rules against this. We are allowed to take joy in bringing other people joy, no fine print. While sending the dutiful “ugh im sorry” text makes me feel like shit for being an unimaginative friend, taking a few extra minutes to send them a thoughtful Venmo makes me feel like an unstoppable force. It’s my creative rebellion in the face of the corporate death march. If I get canceled for being too sincere, so be it! The adult world can be grim. I need this.

The open-handed Venmo is an antidote to the emotionless, transactional world. It’s the opposite of “connecting” with someone on LinkedIn, or “hoping this email finds you well!” It’s proof that kindness, when you think about it, is actually kind of punk rock.

So the next time one of your friends is feeling sad—this should only take 30 minutes or so—try sending them a little treat in the form of a small-sum Venmo. They’ll feel good. You’ll feel good. And when we’re all feeling good, that’s when we rally together, high off selflessness or selfishness or some blend of both, and realize we’re a self-contained economy that circulates the same five dollars! Armed with that knowledge, perhaps we withdraw from mainstream culture completely. We start a small commune in rural Maine, where our days are spent sending, receiving, or waiting for our turn to send or receive The Venmo. It’s a deeply fulfilling life, but can it last? After the summer, as the cold sets in, people start to defect. Word gets back to the commune that some defectors have called it a cult. “They don’t understand the cause,” you tell yourself. By winter, infighting and lack of food causes the remaining members to slowly return to their previous depressing adult lives. It’s just you out there, the one true believer in The Venmo. But you can’t send and receive money to yourself. You need others. That’s when you have an idea to recruit new members: Pitch an article to WIRED magazine.

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