The High Cost of a Free Wave

So the basic idea of a city is that you live on top of a bunch of strangers, and to make this tolerable, society has developed a complex set of informal rules and social contracts. One of the most important is the Neighborly Nod™. This is a low-cost, low-commitment gesture that says, “I acknowledge your existence, affirm we are not immediate threats to one another, and promise not to call the cops if your trash can lid blows into my yard.” It’s a brilliant system.

A Redditor, however, recently experienced a catastrophic failure of this system[^1]. The protocol is simple: see neighbor, offer brief wave. But in this case, the input was flawed. The person across the street was not the friendly neighbor but a complete stranger. The system, however, had already executed the command: WAVE.EXE. The stranger, not being party to the unspoken rules of the Neighborly Nod™, interpreted this signal not as a low-cost social lubricant, but as a high-value, unsolicited bid for attention. And he accepted the bid.

This is a classic problem of informational asymmetry. The waver thought they were engaging in a well-understood social algorithm with a known counterparty. The wavee, operating under a completely different set of rules (perhaps the “Any Human Contact Is a Binding Contract” doctrine), received what he perceived as a clear signal of interest. His incentives suddenly changed from “mind my own business” to “maximize return on this unexpected social investment.” And so he began to invest heavily, showing up at her door, asking why she hadn’t waved again[^2].

The comment section, as it always does, offered a suite of risk mitigation strategies. The prevailing theory seems to be that the solution to one failed social signal is to deploy a barrage of more complex, deceptive signals. Wear a wedding ring you don’t own. Buy large men’s work boots for your porch to simulate a more intimidating counterparty. This is the financialization of personal safety—creating synthetic derivatives (a husband) to hedge the underlying risk (a creepy guy).

The real takeaway here is about transaction costs. That wave was supposed to be free. It was meant to be a negligible social expenditure with a small peace-of-mind dividend. But because of a misidentified counterparty, it accrued massive, ongoing costs in the form of fear, police reports, and the need to purchase prop workwear. It’s a powerful reminder: in the market for personal peace, there is no such thing as a truly free lunch. Or in this case, a free wave.

[^1]: The post itself is a masterpiece of modern anxiety, concluding with the neighbor asking, “Why you no wave again?” which is just a devastatingly efficient way to create dread.

[^2]: This is the equivalent of making a small, polite investment in a company and having its CEO show up at your house demanding to know why you haven’t wired them more money.