It's Not Stealing; They Prefer to Think of It as Borrowing

Filed in archive General on May 28, 2008

© sves

I would rather lend someone money than lend them my stuff. If you lend money, most people seem to have enough guilt to try to pay you back at some point. But lend your stuff out and people will never give it back. Remember that book you really liked that you raved to your friend about and then Lent out? That was, what, two years ago? You're never going to see that book again.

There's something about human nature that makes people less likely to give you your stuff back than they would be to pay you your money back. Part of it is easy to understand - money is interchangeable; if you give me $20 today, I can pay you $20 back another day out of whatever cash I have on hand. If you lend me your Slayer CD, I can't just drop off to you the Justin Guarini CD that was laying on the floor of my car and call it even. You want back the exact CD you gave me. So it's more work to give something back than it is to pay money back. I get that.

But I think it's something more. I think people believe that if you lent them something, it sort of means you don't want it anymore. If you lend me a book, it's because you've already read it; you'll probably never read it again, I won't be in a hurry to get it back to you. If you lend me your wet-dry vacuum, you probably are done having a dirty house and so I'll keep it until the end of time.

And if you're the lender, there's nothing worse than the feeling of having to ask for something back that you lent out. Now if you lent money, you can just wait for a situation where it makes sense to bring it up. "Oh, you want to get a cup of coffee? Great. You can pay with that 5 bucks you owe me." That doesn't work so easily with stuff: "Hey, I'm having a party and you're invited. It's a James Bond theme so you have to bring back all my James Bond DVDs that you never gave back to me you lousy bastard." That comes across as rude, no?

So, anyway, if someone ever wants to lend you something, don't do it, because you're not going to return it and they're going to think you're a jerk and it's going to ruin your whole relationship even though no one will say so and when you've drifted apart and you're kind of confused as to why that happened you'll forget that maybe it's because you didn't return the second season of Lost.