I grew up watching every peso carefully. Not out of genuine hardship, but out of a mindset I had absorbed somewhere along the way: money was mine to protect. I gave when I expected something in return. I withheld when I did not.
Psychologists call this a scarcity mindset. It is the cognitive tendency to treat limited resources, whether time, money, or attention, as something to be hoarded rather than shared. Research suggests it can narrow our thinking, making it harder to see beyond our immediate needs and easier to overlook the needs of others. For a long time, I did not know I had it. I thought I was simply being sensible.
Then a 10-peso coin changed how I see things.
It happened on an ordinary school afternoon. A friend and I stopped at a nearby 7-Eleven. Outside the entrance stood a man who spent his days holding the door open for customers. I had walked past him many times before. I had never once acknowledged him.
That day, as we came out, I did what I always did: I looked away and moved on. Then I heard my friend stop. I turned around to see him placing a small coin into the man’s palm. It was nothing by any ordinary measure, barely enough to buy a cheap snack. But the man’s face shifted in a way that I have not forgotten. He was close to tears. He told my friend that he now had enough to buy a bottle of water.
My friend said something quietly in reply and walked on as if nothing significant had happened. Because for him, nothing significant had happened. That is what struck me.
Afterwards, I asked him why he had given the money. He said something that has stayed with me ever since: those 10 pesos meant almost nothing to me, but they meant everything to him.
That is not just a lesson in generosity. It is a lesson in what psychologists call value asymmetry: the same object or action can carry vastly different emotional and practical weight depending on who is experiencing it. A small act of care can register as enormous when someone is barely getting by. We tend to judge the significance of what we give by what it costs us. But significance, in reality, is determined by what it means to the person receiving it.
What troubled me more, as I turned that moment over in my mind, was how much of my life I had been evaluating at face value. Not just money, but relationships, gestures, and efforts. I had been quick to dismiss what seemed small without ever asking what it might mean to someone else. That kind of thinking is subtle. It does not announce itself as selfishness. It tends to feel like realism.
But it is worth asking: what does it cost us to give a little more, and what might it offer someone who needs it? The psychological literature on prosocial behaviour consistently shows that acts of giving, even small ones, benefit both parties. They reduce the giver’s stress, increase a sense of social connection, and reinforce a more generous self-concept over time. Generosity is not just morally sound. It appears to be good for us.
I am not going to pretend that a single moment transformed me entirely. Change rarely works that way. But that encounter did something quieter and more lasting: it made me more attentive. I began to notice what I had been filtering out. The held-open door. The extra effort someone made. The small gesture that cost the other person something they did not advertise.
We live in a culture that measures worth in large numbers. But meaning often operates at a different scale. Brené Brown has written about the relationship between vulnerability and connection, and while her focus is not on money, the underlying insight applies: what brings people close to one another is rarely grand gestures. It is the willingness to show up in small ways, consistently, with attention to what the other person actually needs.
That man outside the 7-Eleven was not asking for much. He just needed someone to see him. My friend did. And for a moment, so did I.
