when did debt become a dirty word?

and what do we truly owe each other?

Before there was money, there was memory.

Not banks. Not balances. Not APRs, credit scores, or Venmo requests.
Just mutual understanding. Just grain lent across winters. Labor shared across generations. A neighbor who helped raise your roof, and whom you would feed come harvest. Trust, not transaction, was the thread.

Anthropologist David Graeber begins Debt: The First 5000 Years with a provocation: the story we’ve been told about early economies is mostly fiction. The myth goes like this: first there was barter, people swapped cows for shoes and salt for cloth. Then, because barter was inconvenient, money was invented. Eventually, markets became complex, necessitating contracts, interest rates, and debt.