My wife and I drove Michigan's beautiful Leelanau peninsula the other day. We stopped in Sutton's Bay and hit a few bars. At the last bar, the manager finally got us a table on the roof of his busy establishment, but at that point, we'd had quite a bit to drink and were ready to go next door for locally acclaimed pizza.
But we wanted to see the view from the roof so we went up.
We sat down, the waiter came and brought us menus. We sat there for about six minutes, enjoying our view of Lake Michigan. I then slipped a dollar bill under the napkin holder to pay six minutes' worth of rent, went down to the patio, jumped a short fence, and left without anyone seeing us.
It felt good.
I'd paid for our drinks with cash. No one knew who we were. If the manager thought, "That jerk-off asked for a place on the roof and then didn't order any food once he was up there," oh well.
It wasn't my fault it took them so long to get us a spot on the roof. It may have been my fault that I had gotten pretty inebriated and desperately needed some greasy pizza to quell the effects, but hey, s*** happens.
Besides, I had disappeared. I'll probably never be back there. No one knew me; no one knows me. They can't look at my credit card information and figure out who I am. I vanished, like the wind.
That smidgeon of anonymity felt great.
That pitifully pitiful pleasure goes away if our society goes cashless. It's a small thing . . . heck, it's a nano thing.
But small things add up.
And on top of that, a cashless society comes with a lot of existential problems as well.
