I hate the injection of personality into technological instances or common hiccups in modern Internet culture. My heart monitor watch shows me a smiley face while booting up, Github buttons spam "Buy me a coffee!", Reddit says shit like, "Don't panic" when a webpage doesn't load. Shut the fuck up and leave me alone. I am so tired of being surrounded by these pale imitations of reality, like I need to be pacified with pseudo-emotions or meme culture every step of my day.
There's an anthropological term for this, generalized reciprocity (the chill kind) vs balanced or symmetrical reciprocity (the George Costanza kind). My old roommates and I would always be like "generalized reciprocity" with a hand wave when there was any unequal exchange, was nice.
My two best friendships have consisted of buying each other food, cooking for each other, buying the other one tickets to a concert to not go alone, buying each other video games to share the experience etc.
Another consisted of a dude (I thought was a good friend at the time) crashing at my place 2-3 nights a week and sharing food with me, only to give me a fucking bill when he was moving away. Like, fucking what? And I was such an insecure lonely at the time that I paid it to continue the friendship, which ended there anyway.
That last one's messed up, wtf. Like, giving a friend the exact amount of money you owe them is weird enough, but billing them??