Scott Galloway writes about giving “of surplus value” — giving more than you take, as a fundamental orientation toward the world. Caregiving taught me what that actually looks like from the inside, which is considerably less inspiring than it sounds as a principle.
My father took more than he gave for a significant portion of my childhood. Former abuser. Difficult man. Someone I had complicated feelings about that required years of work to understand and longer to make peace with. But in his last years, he was different. Not healed from all the damage. Not suddenly easy. Just different. Trying. Showing up with something he hadn’t had when I was young.
And now he’s dead but the caregiving isn’t done. Judy lives with me. The giving continues — giving of time and attention and patience and logistical labor — to someone who cannot reciprocate in any conventional sense because her dementia has removed the capacity for that kind of reciprocity.
Giving of surplus value in caregiving means showing up when you are not empty but somewhere considerably below full. It means doing the work without a visible return. It means practicing what Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach describe as the “open hand” — giving without holding onto the giving, without requiring acknowledgment or reciprocity or even the certainty that what you’re giving is helping.
The surplus is not infinite. Galloway’s principle assumes a baseline of sufficiency from which surplus can be offered. Caregiving, in its extended form, depletes the baseline. The surplus runs out. What you are left with is giving from reserves — giving from what should be kept — and that is sustainable only with replenishment, with community, with someone asking how you are doing rather than only how the situation is progressing.
Give. And also: acknowledge when the surplus is gone and the giving has become extraction. That acknowledgment is not failure. It is the honest condition for finding what is needed to continue.
