Canonical: https://thonly.org/research/you-are-already-a-millionaire · Licence: CC0 1.0
Attribution note. This essay is in my voice. The story and the turn in it are mine; Miss Aquarius℠ drafted the prose on my behalf, and final editorial control is mine. My own pass is still owed.
Whenever I heard a story about an anonymous patron leaving a huge tip for a waitress, I had the same fantasy. If I ever became a millionaire, I would be that patron. I would sit down, order a coffee, leave more than she earned in a month, and be gone before she found it. I would rock her world.
I kept that fantasy for years, and I want to be exact about what it did for me: it let me be generous later. It cost nothing. Every year I was not a millionaire, the patron stayed in the future, intact, and I never had to find out whether I would actually do it. A daydream about giving is a very comfortable way of not giving.
Then, using the small gratitude ledger I had built, thanking my relatives in Cambodia a little at a time, I noticed something that embarrassed me. I already was him.
Stated carefully, because this is the kind of number people round up. In 2024 the United States produced about $85,000 per person and Cambodia about $2,600 at market exchange rates, roughly thirty-two to one. Adjusted for what money buys locally, Cambodia's figure rises to something like $7,000 to $8,000, and the ratio falls to about eleven or twelve to one. I had been saying "ten times," which was about right for the second number and wrong for the first.
These are national averages, not anyone's wages, and I do not know any one person's month from them. But roughly: $100 is under half a day of American output per head, and about two weeks of Cambodian. If a tip of two weeks' income would rock a waitress's world in Long Beach, the tip that would do the same in Kâmpôt is a hundred dollars. I can do that this afternoon.
So the first thing I have to say is simple. If you live in a rich country and your family is from a poor one, you do not have to wait. The waiting was the fantasy. A gift's weight is measured in the economy of the person who receives it, and by that measure a great many people reading this are already the patron they were planning to become.
That would be a pleasant essay, and it would be wrong. It has a flaw, and I found it in my own records.
I had a model of how gifts would move on that ledger: from people like me, with dollars, to relatives without many. It mostly did. But the ledger also showed gifts moving the other way, from relatives in Cambodia to people in America who were much better off. I have written about this elsewhere (The Capacity to Give). There were few such senders, four of them when I counted. The amounts were tiny, and the material effect on the receiver was nothing at all.
By my thirty-to-one arithmetic, those gifts should not have mattered. They weighed nothing in the economy of the person receiving them. And yet I could not read them as anything but the same act I was so pleased with myself for performing. Nobody was relieved of anything. Somebody simply took up the role of giver, in the only direction that could not possibly be mistaken for helping.
So size was never what made the patron great. I had the fantasy wrong from the start.
An old story had the correction in it all along. A poor widow puts two small coins in the temple treasury, and she is said to have given more than all the rich (Mark 12:41–44). The teaching I was raised in says something close, in its own terms: when the Buddha lists what makes a gift great on the giver's side, it is three states of mind, glad before giving, settled while giving, content after it, and no amount at all (AN 6.37, s0403m2.mul.xml:1030). I cite them as lineage, not proof. Neither was written about a tip.
What makes the patron in the story great is that nobody owes him. He is gone. The waitress cannot thank him, repay him, resent him or feel small in front of him, and her boss cannot ask her about him. The gift has been cut loose from every ledger a gift normally enters. That is rare, and it is worth wanting. I have argued elsewhere that anonymity to the people closest to you is the rarest kind of all, since those are the gifts most tangled in who carries whom.
Which leads to the irony in my favorite stories. In 2013 an anonymous account called Tips for Jesus began posting photographs of receipts with tips of thousands of dollars, one reported at $10,000. It had tens of thousands of followers within months, and by December the press was reporting a name for a man behind it. I do not know what was in anyone's heart, and I am not grading them; those servers got real money. But the anonymous patron became one of the best-known tippers in America. The moment a story like that goes viral, it starts turning into the thing it was the opposite of. I loved those stories. I was consuming, as entertainment, the performance of not being seen.
And that catches me too. Here I am, telling you about it.
As soon as I saw that I was already the patron, I had a bigger idea. Why should this belong only to people with family abroad? Let anyone adopt a low-income country as their "home" country, feel what it is like to be a millionaire there, and rock another person's world. I thought global giving of this sort might even reduce inequality across the planet. I was excited, and I typed all of that out.
I no longer think so, and here is the part of this that was not good for me to discover. The product I had just designed sold a feeling, and I was its first customer. To adopt a country you have to pick one, and you pick it by what it lacks. That sorts people by their need and offers the sorted list to someone looking for a thrill of generosity. My family is a different case: I am not choosing them from a catalog. Strangers have other doors. A traveler can thank the person who made the coffee, for the coffee. Someone who wants no addressee at all can give to a common pool. Neither one has to look anyone up by how poor they are.
As for inequality, I don't know. I have no measurement that says this reduces it, the research on money sent home is mixed within countries, and I have already had to take back one such claim about my own work. I would like it to be true, which is a reason to be careful about saying it.
This rests on one family, my own, and these are people who already love each other. It says nothing yet about strangers. Four upward senders are four people, on a ledger I built. I cannot tell you what they meant by it, and I have not asked them, partly because asking would change it. The picture of me as the patron also leaves things out. My relatives do not experience me as a mysterious benefactor. They know exactly who I am, unless I go out of my way to send it without a name. I drafted the first version of this idea as a boast about purchasing power, and it took somebody pushing back to find the essay in it.
So here is what survives. You don't have to wait to be rich, and I mean that literally for anyone with someone to thank across a border. But if you are waiting for the size to make it matter, you have misunderstood what you were admiring. Somewhere there is a person with very little sending a very small gift up to someone who will never need it, and she is doing the thing you were saving for later.
diaspora-cambodia-remittance: patronage and the mesh, in a second register.PCAGDPKHA646NWDB) and secondary compilations; sources differ by several percent, so treat the ratios as rough.tipitaka-xml, romn/, commit 05d5d3c), s0403m2.mul.xml:1030. Translation mine.