Reciprocity

A few years ago, I flew to Canada to attend a friend’s wedding.  Towards the end of my stay I lost my mobile phone. There was a time when losing a phone would be nothing more than a moderate inconvenience, since they can be insured, quickly replaced, and have neither intrinsic nor sentimental value. They once were disposable items.  However, in the past decade they have become objects of greater significance owing to the large amount of information they store and the multiple functionality they possess.  We use them to send messages and emails, connect with social media applications and the internet, store contact details and photographs, wake us up in the morning and tell us the time during the day, allow us to pay bills and transfer money, listen to music and watch videos and podcasts, find our current location and the best route to our destination, and, from time to time, we even use them to make phone calls.

It was particularly annoying, therefore, to find myself phone-less in Vancouver.  I lost routine contact with the daily news, with messages that might have been sent to me, and became dependent on others to help me with tasks that normally I would have managed easily on my own, such as booking a taxi to take me to the airport for my flight home and checking in online.  I was unable to take pictures at the wedding and the reception, and I worried that when I returned to London, even though I would be able to get a new phone, I might find that I had lost valuable data that was saved on my subscriber identification module and no-where else.  I was cross with myself for losing my phone – where had I left it? – and cross too that I had failed to back-up all that was stored there and nowhere else.

Around twenty-four hours after it went missing, a friend who was also at the wedding, received a text sent from a number they did not recognise, with a Canadian dialling code.  Earlier that day, he had called my number a couple of times, to see if someone would answer or, if not, at least to provide a ‘missed call’ number that someone could potentially redial to identify the owner of the lost phone.  He lent me his phone and I called the number.  I spoke with a helpful but busy woman, and we arranged a rendezvous the following day, on my way to catch my flight, as her place of work was close to the airport. We duly met and my phone was returned to me.

The woman told me that her daughter had found it, on the seat of a taxi – ah, so that was when I lost it! – and had proposed trying to sell it, claiming it might fetch $50 or more.  She had overruled, saying that to sell a found object for gain would attract bad karma. Instead, she had taken custody of the phone and, once my friend had used his phone to call my number, she had found a way to return the lost property.  She did not think of herself as the beneficiary of a windfall gain, rather she saw herself under obligation to try to return the object to its owner, which she did.  I was grateful, and still remember sitting in the airport lounge delighted to be reacquainted with my phone and equally delighted to have been the beneficiary of the kindness of a stranger.

A couple of years prior to my trip to Canada, I had been the finder of a lost phone.  Returning to London from Cambridge, on an early evening train, about ten minutes into the journey I heard a loud ringtone.  I picked up a newspaper that had been discarded on the seat opposite to discover underneath it a mislaid mobile phone.   I answered the call and was told, “You appear to have found my phone,” to which I replied “Yes, it appears that I have.”   This phone, I discovered, belonged to someone who had travelled from London and had just changed trains for King’s Lynn.  He was now heading north-east away from Cambridge, as I was headed south back to London.  He was staying in Norfolk for the weekend and I was planning to fly to Ireland the following morning.  We soon realised that our chances of meeting within the next few days, for me to return his phone in person, were slim. 

I asked him where he worked in London and he told me that he was a partner in one of the big City law firms.  Although this would not be on my quickest route home, neither was it a major diversion, maybe adding thirty minutes to my travel time.  Thus, I offered to take his phone to his office and leave it there for him at the reception desk.  He was delighted with my suggestion.  When, an hour or so later, I introduced myself to the evening receptionist at the large, modern office close to Moorgate, where he worked, he had already been in contact with them, with instructions that his phone should be couriered to him by car him immediately.  I estimated that would be at least a two-hour drive, each way.  He was clearly someone who missed continuous access to his phone even more so that I did.

I do not believe in karma, good or bad; nor in the existence of some form of divine or cosmic justice, that balances outcomes over time across the universe; nor that there is any kind of natural mechanism that distributes reward and punishment in some non-arbitrary way.  To the contrary, my observation is that many people suffer from undeserved hardship, through accident, illness, or from calamitous forms of social disruption such as war or famine; likewise many others enjoy long, successful, and mostly trouble-free lives despite not being good, generous, or kind people.  There are no strong correlations in life between contribution and outcome, between effort and reward, between goodness and pleasure, or between badness and pain. 

What, then, motivated me to return the lawyer’s phone when I could have ignored it and left the call unanswered, or taken the phone to sell or keep for myself?  And what motivated the woman in Vancouver to overrule her daughter and return my phone to me?  I think there is an important principle at work here, which we might call social reciprocity.  By this, I mean not just that if I do something helpful to you, I should expect you to do something helpful to me, although that seems to be true.  Exchanging gifts with those whom we know is a fundamental social custom.  I mean, in addition, that sometimes we find ourselves in the position where we could do something helpful to someone we don’t know, whom most likely will never return the favour, because we will probably never see each other again.   I never met the lawyer who left his phone on the train, and I doubt that I will meet the woman from Vancouver for a second time, even were I to return to visit the city for a second time.  I realise that I cannot now remember either of their names.  We will remain strangers to each other for the rest of our lives, but strangers who both remember that one gave assistance for which the other was grateful.

The motivation for an act of kindness to a stranger should not be the expectation that it will be repaid or returned by the recipient.  Nonetheless, if we all were to undertake such acts, from time to time, we might find ourselves one day to be the beneficiary.  As I remember well, it a rewarding experience to have.  A good lesson to learn early in life, is that much that happens to us and to others seems unfair and often there is little we can do to change that.  We learn, as we mature, to adjust and adapt to the random distribution of outcomes.  It is, I think, advisable to recognise that what happens to us in life is mostly unmerited, to avoid dwelling on bad luck when it occurs and, most definitely, to resist the temptation to assume that when things go well for us they are deserved, that we are somehow entitled to good fortune. 

In my previous text I suggested that when we can, for example, at work when we are in the position to make appointments or promotions,  or when we are invited to appreciate artistic or other social achievement, we should try to adopt the principle of merit.  Better to reward effort than reinforce entitlement, seems to me to be the right way to act.  However, as this text argues, in much of life there is no mechanism for the matching of effort and reward, no protocol for ensuring that each receives their just deserts.  When things go wrong for us, we find ourselves at the mercy of the kindness of strangers.  Next time you find a lost phone, it is worth remembering that.