Give Me Ten Dollars
I sure don't deserve it. Do it anyway!
Read my sob story
I sure don't deserve it. Do it anyway!
Greetings! Allow me to introduce myself. I'm Teejay. I have no debt, no car payment, no student loans, and no children. I work in tech. I haven't been to an office since 2007 and often work in my bathrobe from the comfort of my home. I am, by any reasonable measure, doing great financially.
And I want you to give me ten dollars.
You're reading this and you already feel the slight tightening behind your eyes and the warmth rising in your chest. A voice in the back of your mind is asking who the fuck does this guy think he is?
Good. Hold onto that feeling. It means you're paying attention.
I haven't done anything to earn your ten dollars. I haven't run a marathon for charity. I haven't survived serious illness. I haven't invented a product that will change your life. I'm just a privileged white guy who's tired of working a mindless, bullshit job and is now asking strangers on the Internet for money so he doesn't have to.
Not because I need it, but because I want it. There's a difference, and that's what makes this so irritating.
It's okay, it'll be over soon.
The great thing about this is that it's sure to offend everyone equally.
Believe in hard work, self-reliance, and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps? Here's your reason to be furious: I am a grown man who could be working a real job right now. I could be contributing to the economy. Instead I'm sitting in my house in sweatpants asking you for a handout. I take long midday showers. I go for walks when other people are in meetings. If it helps to legitimize it for you, think of me as a distinguished scholar in the art of doing nothing. I'm working really hard at my dissertation. I'll tell you more after my Nap Studies class.
On the other hand, if you're a bleeding heart who pines for justice and equity, allow me to infuriate you: I'm a white, cisgendered man in America twenty years into a tech career. I have ample savings and in-demand skills. I have the kind of safety net that most people only dream about. Asking you for money isn't just unnecessary; it's absolutely and unequivocally obscene.
You're all right to be so upset. That's what makes this fun.
There's a scene in The Gambler where John Goodman offers advice to a gambler up on his luck:
"You get up two-and-a-half million dollars, any asshole in the world knows what to do. You get a house with a 25-year roof, an indestructible economy shitbox car and you put the rest into the system at 3 to 5 percent and you pay your taxes. That's your base. Get me? That's your fortress of fucking solitude. That puts you, for the rest of your life, at a level of Fuck You."
"Someone wants you to do something? Fuck You. Boss pisses you off? Fuck You. Own your house. Have a couple of bucks in the bank. Don't drink. That's all I have to say to anybody."
"Did your grandfather take risks?"
"Yes."
"I guarantee he did it from a position of Fuck You."
"A wise man's life is based around Fuck You. The United States of America is based upon Fuck You. You're a king? You have an army? You have the greatest Navy in the history of the world? Fuck You."
But me? I don't need two-and-a-half million. I live simply. No car payment, streaming subscriptions, or expensive phone plans. I buy groceries, I pay my mortgage, I occasionally buy a used book, and I travel lightly now and again. That's about it.
I already have retirement savings and I'm not starting from zero. But $500,000 invested in a total stock market index fund like VTSAX would supplement what I've already saved and close the gap for good. The historical average annual return of the U.S. stock market, adjusted for inflation, is approximately 7%. If I use 4% per year, which is the standard safe withdrawal rate backed by decades of retirement research, that'll give me $20,000 a year in supplemental income every year.
Combined with my existing savings, that's enough to fund my modest lifestyle, forever. My fortress of fucking solitude.
I could start a pointless online business to make a living, but I don't want to pollute the world with more nonsense. Nobody really needs me to continue working in tech. We'll all get on just fine... in fact, the world will probably be a better place if I don't go find another soul-crushing corporate gig.
My dream only costs fifty thousand people ten dollars each. Or one very bored and lonely billionaire. I'm not picky.
You'll feel something. I can't promise it'll be good.
First, I'll wake up without an alarm and make a cup of coffee. I'll drink it slowly, sitting in a chair, looking out the window at all the people rushing to their deadend jobs while I loaf about in my bathrobe.
Then, once I'm ready, I'll finish writing my novel. I've been carrying it around for years, the whole thing living in the back of my head while I sit in mindless client meetings and write software that'll probably never get used, anyway. With time and no deadlines, I'll finally finish the damn thing.
I'll travel, but not the fast-paced, luxury travel you see on Instagram. I want to ride my bicycle through river valleys in Europe and eat bread I bought at a market that morning. I'll sit in cafes in cities where I don't speak the language and watch the world go by.
And I'll help other people do what I've done. Not everyone wants to live as frugally as I do, but a lot of people want to stop trading their entire lives for a paycheck. I know how to build a life that costs almost nothing to run. I want to teach that. Write about it. Sit across from someone and help them see that the exit door is closer than they think.
In his essay In Praise of Idleness, Bertrand Russell argued that the moral virtue of work is a myth propagated by the ruling class to keep the rest of us too busy to think. He was right then, and he's right now. Your ten dollars will help make Russell's philosophy a reality. Well, at least for me.
Either you're genuinely considering giving me ten dollars, or you're building a case for why this is the most despicable website you've ever visited. Both are acceptable.
Every transaction you've ever made was a negotiation. Someone had something you wanted, and so you both agreed on a price. I have nothing to offer you, and I'm telling you that without misleading you. The least you can do is give me ten dollars for my candid honesty.
We live in a culture that tells us every dollar must be earned. Yet the wealthiest people on the planet got that way through a combination of luck, timing, and systems that were built to favor them. I'm not saying I deserve your ten dollars. But you have to admit the word "deserve" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in a world where it was never evenly distributed to begin with.
For just ten dollars, you can give the gift of extreme, unearned sloth.
When you finally give me ten dollars, you'll be invited to leave a public note. This is your chance to tell me exactly what you think of me and this entire enterprise.
Tell me I'm lazy. Tell me I'm entitled. Tell me I'm everything that's wrong with my generation, or my gender, or my tax bracket. Tell me that you work sixty hours a week and the idea of some guy from the Internet sitting on his floor doing nothing while you pay for it makes your blood boil.
Or tell me you get it. Tell me you've thought about asking for something you didn't earn just to see what would happen. Tell me about your actual hopes and dreams, the ones that make you feel alive, the ones that continue to be muted by the grind of relentless, meaningless work. Tell me about your silent revolution.
The notes are public and will be posted here for everyone to see. Some will be angry. Some will be funny. Some will be deeply, profoundly weird. But all of them cost ten dollars.
No donations yet. Someone has to go first. It could be you. It probably shouldn't be, but it could.
Anonymous donations are fine. Angry notes are encouraged.
My grandfather taught me to program computers when I was six years old. By eight I was teaching other kids. That head start compounded for decades.
I've never been denied a job because of how I look.
I've never been followed in a store.
I've never had to explain a gap on my resume because I was incarcerated, or because I was fleeing domestic violence, or because the economy collapsed and nobody in my zip code was hiring.
If I fall on hard times, I have a loving family who would take me in.
I have savings. Not because I'm smarter than you, but because I got a twenty-year head start in a well-paying industry and never had a catastrophe I couldn't absorb.
I have no children. This is not a virtue, but an enormous financial advantage that I did nothing to earn.
I am writing this from my home office in a city I chose to live in, on a weekday afternoon, while other people are at work.
I have health insurance.
I have never gone hungry except by choice. I've fasted for spiritual reasons. Some people fast because there's nothing in the fridge and no money to fill it.
I was born in a country where clean water comes out of the tap. I have never once worried about this.
I own my home. The mortgage is modest. Nobody can evict me on a landlord's whim.
I've never had to choose between medication and rent.
I went to college. Sometimes I even skipped classes just because I didn't feel like going.
I have a credit score high enough that banks compete to lend me money I don't need.
When I get pulled over, I get annoyed, not afraid.
I can walk into any job interview in tech and leave with an offer. I've done it dozens of times. The worst outcome I've ever experienced is a polite rejection email.
I have a passport which I use for leisure, not survival.
My neighborhood is quiet: I chose it. The people in the loud neighborhoods didn't choose theirs.
I have enough free time to build a website asking strangers for money. That alone should disqualify me from receiving any.
I am, in short, the last person on earth who should be asking for money. Which is exactly why I'm doing it.
You're sitting there looking at this screen. You've been reading for a few minutes now. You feel the weight of your phone or laptop in your hands. You hear the ambient noises in the room: an air conditioner, a furnace, the floorboards creaking, the traffic outside, conversations.
Somewhere underneath all of that, there's a feeling you carry around. It's a low-grade hum that never quite goes away. It's that nagging sense that you should be doing more: Get that promotion, make the sale, get into shape, finally meet the love of your life.
So I ask: What if the ten dollars isn't about me at all?
What if giving ten dollars to a stranger who openly admits he doesn't deserve it is the most subversive thing you do this week? A tiny act of economic absurdism. A middle finger to the idea that every transaction produce value, that every dollar be invested, and that every moment be monetized.
You work hard to earn your money. The system tells you that you should spend it rationally. Ten dollars on a latte? That's a treat and you've earned it. Ten dollars on a monthly streaming subscription? That's entertainment. Ten dollars to an online grifter who will spend it on coffee and used books?
Now that's freedom.
The most economically indefensible thing you'll do today.
"Get a job."
Nah, I'm good. I've had a job before and it was terrible. I'd much rather stay at home and do what I want. Why is it that a man with marketable skills who chooses to sit on the floor instead of maximizing his earning potential is committing some kind of moral failing?
I understand your objection, but I wholeheartedly disagree with the premise. The idea that human worth is measured by productive output is a relatively modern invention, and not a very good one.
"This is what's wrong with America."
Maybe. But I'd argue that what's wrong with America is that we've confused busyness with virtue, consumption with success, and exhaustion with dedication. I'm not the disease. I'm a symptom... and a fairly harmless one, all things considered. At least I'm not a CEO asking for a bailout!
"Nobody owes you anything."
Correct. That's the entire point. You don't owe me ten dollars, and I certainly haven't earned it. There is no exchange of value here. And yet, if you give it to me, something strange happens. You've done something purely voluntary. No obligation, no guilt. Just a choice. Isn't that what freedom is supposed to look like?
"You're taking money that could go to people who actually need it."
You're right. And you should give money to people who actually need it. Give to your local food bank, mutual aid fund, housing coalition. I'm not competing with them. I'm offering something different: the experience of giving money to someone who doesn't need it and openly acknowledges it. If that experience has no value to you, don't do it.
"Check your privilege."
I have thoroughly checked my privilege. Scroll up. I wrote a whole section about that. I'm not pretending to be a sympathetic figure. Give me ten dollars.
"This is a stunt."
Yes. But stunts can contain truths. The truth here is that money flows in irrational directions all the time, but we dress it up in language that makes it feel rational. Let's skip all of that. Give me ten dollars.
Universal outrage, one transaction at a time.
Have you ever had a bullshit job? David Graeber coined the term. It's the kind of job where you show up, push paper around, attend meetings about meetings, produce reports nobody reads, and go home knowing that if your position vanished overnight, the world would continue to turn without the slightest wobble.
Most jobs are like this now. I've held plenty of them. I've built software that existed solely to help one company extract money from another company. I've sat in rooms where grown adults debated the color of a button for forty-five minutes while the planet burned outside. Most of the jobs I've held have been schemes to transfer wealth from the bottom to the top, dressed up in Slack channels and quarterly OKRs.
So when I ask you for ten bucks, I'm cutting out the middleman. All I want is to read, make art, and drink coffee. I'm not asking for cocaine and yachts. I just want to exist. And if the job I'd otherwise be doing doesn't provide real value to humanity—if it's just another way to keep the gears spinning on a machine that doesn't need more gears—then why should I waste my time getting there, burn gasoline doing it, and drain my hours on earth pretending it matters?
You could pay a corporation ten bucks and somewhere, three cents of it might trickle down to someone like me. Or you could just give it to me directly. Same ten dollars. Less overhead.
No board of directors. No shareholders. Just a guy and a kettle.
There's a scene in Office Space where Peter Gibbons, worn out from years at a bullshit job, asks his friends what they would do if they had a million dollars. Peter says he would do nothing:
Capitalist busybodies want to read Office Space as a cautionary tale, with Peter's character representing the sloth and apathy that became commonplace in the 1990's. But the film reveals Peter to be right. Before his hypnotherapy-induced liberation, Peter was miserable. He sat in traffic. He stared at a screen. He got dressed every morning in clothes he didn't like to go to a place he didn't want to be to do work that didn't matter. After his breakthrough, he went fishing, gutted a fish at his desk, knocked down a cubicle wall, and started dating the waitress he'd been too chicken to talk to.
Peter watched a hypnotist die from a heart attack trying to help him find his freedom. But me? I just need you to give me ten dollars.
"I can't believe I'm doing this. But I also can't believe I spent $7 on an 'anti-aging' smoothie yesterday and I'm still old and ugly. At least he's being honest."— An early donor
"I feel better than I have in weeks. I think it's because I did something that made absolutely no sense."— Someone who gets it
"I gave $10 and left a note that said 'get a job, hippie.' It was the most satisfying purchase I've made this year."— A satisfied customer
These will be replaced with real testimonials as they come in. For now, you'll have to trust my imagination. Or better yet, become the first real one and give me ten dollars.
Future generations will study this. Probably not favorably.
The reason this website bothers you is that it violates a rule you didn't know you were following: money must be exchanged for something. Labor, goods, services, entertainment. Even when you donate to a cause you care about, you hope it'll make a difference to further that cause.
But here I am, offering you nothing in return. Just words on a screen and an invitation to part with ten dollars for no good reason.
That violation is the product. The act of giving money to someone who hasn't earned it, who won't pretend to have earned it, and who is standing here in plain daylight saying I just want your money and I have no good reason for you to give it to me—that act forces you to confront how think about money, value, and what you owe the world.
You don't owe the world anything. You don't owe me anything. But if you give me ten dollars right now, you'll have done something that has no justification, no ROI, no narrative of self-improvement or charitable virtue.
It's a choice, freely made, for no good reason at all.
Is this legal?
Yes. Asking for money isn't illegal. Lying about what you'll do with it is. I'm telling you exactly what I'll do with it: Buy my freedom from having to work. That's the kind of transparency you're not going to get from your mortgage lender, your utility company, or your bank.
Is this a joke?
No. I really am asking you to give me ten dollars.
Can I give more than $10?
No. Ten dollars. That's it. If you want to give more, come back tomorrow and give another ten.
Can I give less than $10?
Also no. This isn't a tip jar. It's a deliberate request for a specific amount. Give me ten dollars.
What if I want a refund?
You knew what you were getting into. I spent all this time explaining every which way that you're paying me ten dollars for nothing and you're asking for a refund?!
Are you going to pay taxes on this?
Yes. Right after you give me ten dollars.
No more excuses. Just the button and your conscience.
Don't worry, I'm not a completely selfish asshole. Every dollar after $500,000 will be donated directly to Income Movement, the political campaign fighting for Universal Basic Income.
You'll help fund advocacy, lobbying, research, and organizing around the idea that every human being deserves a financial floor.
If it works for me, imagine what it could do for someone who actually needs it. Someone who would use their guaranteed government income not to make entitled websites asking for handouts, but to leave an abusive partner, or go back to school, or start a business, or just breathe for one month without the panic of wondering whether rent will clear.
Love or hate the artificial intelligence revolution, it cannot be denied that the nature of work will change forever. Universal Basic Income is one way our society can spread evenly the gifts of our new, post-scarcity world.
Let's fund my future one Hamilton at a time.
0 people have given $10 to a man who doesn't deserve it.
After $500K, your $10 goes to Income Movement and the fight for Universal Basic Income.
Kings did it for centuries. They sat in castles and collected taxes from people who worked the land and built the roads and grew the food. The king's contribution was being born in the right family. That was enough.
The church did it too. The medieval tithe wasn't optional. Ten percent of everything you grew, harvested, caught, or made was handed over to an institution whose primary product was the promise of not burning forever after you died.
Modern landlords do it. Buy a building, charge people to live inside it, use the rent to buy another building. Their contribution to society is owning stuff. The money comes from the owning, not from any labor performed.
Venture capitalists do it. They give money to people building things, and if the thing works, they take a large percentage of it forever. If the thing fails, they write it off and try another one. The labor is deciding where to put money. The return is disproportionate to the decision.
I'm doing the same thing as all of these institutions, except I'm doing it at the scale of ten dollars and I'm being honest about it. Give me ten dollars. I haven't earned it. That's the deal.
Here is a fact that should bother you more than it does: we already produce enough food to feed ten billion people. We already build enough houses, sew enough clothes, manufacture enough of everything. The problem was never production. The problem is distribution, and the mechanism we chose to handle distribution is forcing everyone to work.
So what happens when necessities are handled but everyone still has to earn a living? You get jobs that exist for no reason other than to justify a paycheck. You get an economy that invents new things to sell because it has to keep people busy. You get fast fashion, planned obsolescence, and subscriptions for products that used to last a lifetime. You get people commuting ninety minutes each way to sit in a building and do work that a spreadsheet could do, burning fuel so they can earn money to buy things they're too exhausted to enjoy.
All most people want is to live their life as they please: Eat a meal they cooked, read a book, sit with someone they love, and walk outside when the weather is nice. The economy does not require your bullshit job to keep the lights on. It requires your bullshit job to keep itself from confronting the question of what would happen if it let you stop.
I'm going to help you answer that question. Give me ten dollars.
If you have a seven-figure net worth, this section is for you.
You have more money than you will ever spend. You know this. Your financial advisor knows this. Your accountant knows this. The third home you bought as an "investment" knows this. The money is sitting in index funds and real estate and offshore accounts accumulating more money that will sit in more index funds and more real estate and more offshore accounts.
You will die with most of it unspent. Your heirs will hire lawyers to fight over it. The lawyers will take a third. The government will take another chunk. The rest will be distributed among people who did nothing to earn it except share your last name, and they will use it to buy boats and make bad investments and hire their own lawyers when they get divorced. This is your legacy.
Or you could give me ten dollars.
I won't buy a boat. I'll buy a bag of coffee beans and sit on my floor and read a book and go for a walk and come home and make dinner. Your ten dollars will fund approximately one day of a man living quietly and deliberately, producing no waste, generating no emissions, and requiring nothing from anyone. I am the most efficient use of your capital you will ever encounter.
Your wealth manager charges you one percent annually to do what a Vanguard target-date fund does for free. Your country club costs four figures a month so you can eat mediocre steak next to other people who also pay four figures a month to eat mediocre steak. You spent eleven hundred dollars on a phone that does the same thing as my two-hundred-dollar phone. You'll replace yours in two years when I've had mine for five.
You are, with all due respect, terrible at spending money. But me? I'm excellent at it. Give me ten dollars and stop being so wasteful.
Less overhead than your last impulse purchase. More honest, too.
Let's talk about where your ten dollars was going before you found this website.
Maybe it was going to a six-pack of beer that would make you feel good for two hours and lousy for eight. Maybe a pack of cigarettes that a corporation engineered to make you buy another pack. Maybe a bag of pot, a scratch ticket, a microtransaction in a video game that lets you wear a slightly different hat.
Those industries have spent billions of dollars engineering the precise neurochemical sequence that makes you hand over your money and feel like it was your idea. They have teams of psychologists, data scientists, and designers whose entire career is making sure you can't stop. They are pretending to give you something in return for your money, but what they're really giving you is a craving for more of itself.
I'm not doing any of that. I'm not manipulating your dopamine. I'm not exploiting a habit loop. I'm not pretending this is a transaction. There is no product here. There is no hit, no rush, no variable reward schedule calibrated to keep you clicking.
I'm just a guy asking you for ten dollars. Honestly. In broad daylight. No tricks. No addiction. No fine print.
Wouldn't you rather give your ten bucks to an honest man who will spend it on coffee and mortgage payments than to a corporation that hired a behavioral psychologist to make sure you couldn't say no? At least when you give it to me, you know exactly what happened. You gave a stranger ten dollars for no reason. That's it. Nobody manipulated anybody.
That's more than the cigarette company can say.
Consider the environmental footprint of a typical American worker. Commute in a gas-burning automobile five days a week, fifty weeks a year. Sit in a climate-controlled office lit with fluorescents and humming with servers. Lunch in plastic containers ordered on delivery apps. A wardrobe bought to impress coworkers you didn't choose, replaced seasonally because the dress code demands it. Online shopping late at night because the day was long and the dopamine had to come from somewhere.
Now consider my footprint. I'm at home. The heat is set to 64. I made my own coffee. I'll eat what's in the fridge. I'm not driving anywhere. I'm not buying anything. I'm not producing anything that needs to be shipped, warehoused, refrigerated, or eventually buried in a landfill.
The most environmentally responsible thing a person in an industrialized economy can do is consume less. And the most reliable way to consume less is to need less money. And the most reliable way to need less money is to stop participating in the cycle that demands earning it and spending it in equal measure.
When you give me your ten dollars, I can finally opt out of that cycle. My carbon footprint will be negligible. Don't you want to save the earth? Give me ten dollars.
I am asking the universe for ten dollars. I am being extremely specific about it. I have built this website to clarify my intention. I have written these thousands of words explaining exactly why I want it, what I'll do with it, and why I don't deserve it. If clarity of intention is the mechanism by which the universe delivers abundance, then this website is the most finely tuned manifestation device ever constructed.
The Law of Attraction says you have to feel the reality of what you want as though it's already here. I am feeling it. I am sitting in my apartment, drinking coffee, doing nothing, living exactly the life I'm asking you to fund. My vibration is perfectly aligned.
So if you believe in the Law of Attraction, giving me ten bucks is cosmically aligned. And if you don't believe in it, giving me ten dollars is funny. Either way, give me ten dollars.
I was born November 14, 1985 at 10:14am: Scorpio sun. The sign of obsession, transformation, and refusing to let go of anything, including your ten dollars. My Pluto is in Scorpio too, which means I am destined to tear down systems and rebuild them from scratch. I am tearing down the one where I work for money and rebuilding one where you just give it to me.
My moon is in Pisces, which means I feel everything too deeply and would rather be making art than filling out TPS reports. My rising sign is Capricorn, which is the sign of ambition and discipline, except in my case the ambition is directed at loafing around and the discipline is applied to doing fuckall.
Mercury in Sagittarius. I talk too much and I think I'm right about everything. But you know that now.
Venus in Libra. I value beauty, harmony, and balance. You know what's not balanced? Me working sixty hours a week while the universe clearly designed me to drink coffee and write. Giving me ten dollars restores this cosmic equilibrium.
If you believe in astrology, my birth chart is a permission slip to do exactly what I'm doing. The cosmos looked at the configuration of the planets on the morning I was born and said: this one is going to ask strangers for money on the internet. It was written in the stars. I'm just honoring my natal chart.
If you don't believe in astrology, I respect that. But you've scrolled this far and you're still here. Something is keeping you on this page, and if it's not Mercury in retrograde, I don't know what it is.
Giving me ten dollars is astrologically inevitable. Why fight it?
Educated stupid humans have been taught to believe that money is ONE-DIRECTIONAL. This is a LIE. Money rotates in FOUR SIMULTANEOUS DIRECTIONS at once, and your refusal to give me ten dollars is proof that you have been INDOCTRINATED by the mono-linear currency hoax perpetuated by the BANKING SPHERE.
Consider: there are FOUR CORNERS to a dollar bill. Each corner represents a FISCAL ROTATION. When you give me ten dollars, the bill completes its SPHERICAL CURRENCY CYCLE and achieves ECONOMIC HARMONY. When you keep it in your wallet, it stagnates in a UNI-ANGULAR DEBT SPIRAL, which is the primary cause of inflation, tooth decay, and the designated hitter rule.
Academia will not teach you this. They are AFRAID. They teach you that money must be EARNED through LABOR, which is a ONE-CORNER THEORY promoted by SPHERELESS ECONOMISTS who have never observed the FOUR-SIMULTANEOUS-DOLLAR-DAY that occurs every time a ten-dollar bill changes hands.
I have observed the Four-Dollar-Day. I have seen the SPHERICAL TRUTH. Your ten dollars does not go to me. It goes THROUGH me, completing its NATURAL ROTATION, returning to the ECONOMIC GRID in a state of SPHERICAL EQUILIBRIUM.
You were taught that giving money to a stranger is irrational. You were taught WRONG. Giving money to a stranger is the ONLY RATIONAL ACT in a SPHERELESS ECONOMY. Every dollar hoarded is a dollar DENIED ITS ROTATION. Every dollar spent at Walmart is a dollar TRAPPED IN A FALSE CORNER. Only by giving ten dollars to a bald man in Baltimore can you RESTORE THE FISCAL SPHERE and achieve MONETARY TRANSCENDENCE.
The banks know this. The government knows this. Your employer knows this. They do not want you to give me ten dollars because TEN DOLLARS IN SPHERICAL ROTATION is more powerful than a THOUSAND DOLLARS IN LINEAR CAPTIVITY.
You have been educated stupid. Give me ten dollars and begin your SPHERICAL FISCAL AWAKENING.
I am not a financial advisor. I am a Spherical Economist. There is a difference and the difference is that I am right.
Patchouli oil doesn't buy itself. (It's like $8 a bottle, actually.)
In the interest of full transparency, here is a partial list of things that cost approximately ten dollars:
That's your ten dollars. No yachts. No champagne. Just a man living quietly and honestly on very little, asking for a bit more of it.
The fact that you've scrolled through twenty screens of a man asking you for money he doesn't deserve tells me something about you. You're curious. You're probably a little contrarian. You have a sense of humor about money and the absurdity of life.
You're the kind of person who questions the status quo. A rebel who wonders why things cost what they cost and why people earn what they earn.
You're also the kind of person who gives ten dollars to a stranger just to see what happens. Not because it's smart or charitable, but because it's interesting and you want to participate in something weird and honest and slightly uncomfortable.
The people who have already done it are your people. They saw something here that they recognized. Maybe outrage. Maybe amusement. Maybe just the rare pleasure of encountering someone who says it how it is.
It's a Tuesday morning, three months from now. You're making coffee. You remember that weird website where the bald guy asked you for ten dollars. You pull it up on your phone. The progress bar has moved. You see more angry notes from people as determined as you to shake things up.
You gave your ten dollars. The world didn't end. Your bank account didn't notice. But something stuck. A small, quiet act of choosing to do something irrational in a world that demands constant rationality.
And if enough people do this pointless, beautiful, stupid thing, you supported the fight for Universal Basic Income and lined the pockets of some online idiot. You were part of that. For ten dollars.
Ten dollars. One click. Zero justification required.
That's all there is to say. I've told you who I am. I've told you I don't deserve your money. I've told you what I'll do with it. Be honest: You weren't going to spend that $10 wisely, anyway. It was going to get squandered on booze or cigarettes or a new fidget spinner. Do you really want to make some billionaire asshole richer, when you could make some hipster doofus richer instead?
I have nothing left to offer you. No product. No service. No promise. Just a modest request, made in broad daylight, with no pretense and no shame:
Give me ten dollars.
That's it. That's the whole website. You can close the tab now, or you can click the button. Both are valid choices. Only one is interesting.