Meditations on Desire’s Tip Jar

Gloria Ann Taylor’s mid-1970s rework of the unyielding soul classic “Love is a Hurtin’ Thing” begins with an admission of a visual hallucination. As she muses, “I gave you my last dime… but it looked like a ten dollar bill to me,” the origin of her affliction is intentional: it’s an invocation of her love, and because of her Love, depleting her financial reserves for their sake is a small price to pay. After all, it felt like pocket change.

Earlier this year, a study by the personal finance outlet MoneyGeek determined that the average cost of a date night for two across 50 major cities in the U.S was $159. It’s a lopsided amount to visualize: clunky to hulk around in cash, awkwardly divisible, and, for the most part, frustratingly arbitrary. Meditations on Desire’s Tip Jar started as a phone call to a multi-generational assortment of people. With their help, the objective was to contextualize $159 in the format of an audio collage exploring hierarchies of prioritization, the social experience of spending, and affectual affordances around desire. If this was the winning amount that should grant a night out, how might one conceive of its value? Did it make them feel flush or was it mostly inconsequential? What would limit, or justify, allocating it towards something they needed or wanted?

The result was a constellation of ruminations about our shared financial reality — a reminder that our perceptions of value are far from fixed, but rather informed by how our ever-evolving relationship to monetary resources are impacted by the translation of labor into capital, or the insistence that collective pleasure is a political act. Fundamental to these revelations was the role of the voice, and the illuminating act of saying out loud the values that are typically practiced in private. Because while conversations about finances can be a sore spot for some, playful abstraction may be a more hospitable way in.

Give it a listen.

-Melissa Vincent