The abundance of serving for free
What changes when money enters the equation?
This feels like an appropriate post for Easter weekend. Thanks to Mark for making time to geek out with me about service, and for reviewing the initial draft.
What’s the difference between serving for free and serving for money?
To many, the answer is pragmatic: money enables service. It sustains teachers, nurses, baristas, and carers. It keeps the lights on. But for others, the question is more philosophical. Can money distort the motivation to serve? Does payment subtly shift the quality of what is offered?
This tension sits at the heart of modern life. It's why we question the intentions of politicians, doubt the sincerity of influencers, and feel something different when a friend helps us move house versus a paid professional. Service, in its purest form, seems relational. Money, at its worst, turns it transactional.
Dana: giving for nothing
To understand this more deeply, I spoke with Mark Ovland. Mark is a Buddhist teacher who recently led a silent retreat I attended. Mark lives entirely through Dana – the ancient practice of offering teachings freely and receiving donations in return.
Mark teaches meditation without charging a fee. The tradition of Dana goes back to the Buddha. Monastics would walk silently with empty bowls. They didn’t ask for food. They simply received what was offered. In return, they offered teachings, presence, and service.
It remains common practice in Buddhist countries, where children are taught to drop food into the bowls carried by monks way before they learn about meditation or buddhist principles.
Dana isn’t just about donating material possessions, time, energy, and wisdom - but also about cultivating a mindset of generosity and compassion. It involves relinquishing attachments and expectations. All key tenets of Buddhism.
Everything he owns, and buys, is made possible through donations (of money) from students and people who want to support him. He lives in a van. He refuses to set prices. And he does it with what he describes as an unshakable, fearlessness faith:
“That everything is, and always will be, deeply and profoundly okay. So even if people don't give me anything, and I end up on the streets, and I have to beg for my food, I am quite sure that my faith will remain unshaken. I will continue to feel at 'home' in the world, and to feel fully held in the loving arms of existence.
This foundational conviction means that he can confidently offer help without the expectation of any sort of return that usually characterises most services.
I’ve talked about the audacity of service before - the conviction required to put something out into the world in the belief not only that others will value it, but that it - in itself - will create some greater value. In his commitment to Dana, Mark is fearlessly taking this audacity to a higher level - to create universal value - value that sits above market value.
Market Logic vs Sacred Practice
"When money is brought into the service relationship, something bad happens to it."
Mark told me about how he once considered a salaried role delivering mindfulness courses in prisons. But the moment he imagined invoicing for those sessions, it jarred. “It felt antithetical to the spirit of the teachings,” he said.
And prisoners could feel the difference. Once he told them he wasn’t being paid, they dropped their guards - suspicion turned to trust.
Michael Sandel argues much the same point in What Money Can’t Buy, that when markets creep into non-market spaces - education, healthcare etc - they crowd out moral sentiments. Altruism, solidarity, even joy – all become distorted.
Why is this? What happens in our minds and hearts when something is freely given vs when we ask for money for it.
Given our discussion, and our shared commitment to Buddhist teachings (mine to a much lower degree!), Mark and I discussed the modern mindfulness sector.
Since the early 2000s, I’ve seen mindfulness become increasingly commodified, stripped of context and resold as a wellness product. Apps, subscriptions, and eight-week corporate courses dominate the field. Although I’d always encourage people to find peace any way they can, I do feel the movement has become a tool for coping within the system, and not for finding a way to stand aside from life and seeing it as it truly is.
I remember going to one of Headspace’s very early events in London, meeting Andy Puddicombe and feeling inspired by his vision of teaching the world to meditate. His meditation app has achieved that in spades, but I can’t help wonder if it’s truly helped people better understand their world. A large proportion of Headspace’s income is from corporations paying for staff subscriptions. “Feeling stressed by your work? Meditate!”
Put this in contrast to the Buddha himself, born a prince 3,000 years ago, but who went on to give away all his knowledge of meditation and mindfulness. His goal was to help people fundamentally change their relationship to reality - to see things as they truly are.
In that sense, Mark’s commitment to Dana is a radical “living out” of the Buddha’s teaching, outside of a Buddhist culture where that is relatively commonplace. In contrast, Headspace has found itself somehow co-opted into the status quo.
Mark is giving freely, but I remember when Headspace brought in monthly subscription fees. I felt a bit sad. Now, I’m not a purist. I myself am COO of a tech startup, much like Andy Puddicombe. I swim in the same water. I’m just pointing out that when money comes into play, it leads to an inevitable change in the characteristics of the service.
The Slippery Slope of Incentives
Behavioural economist Dan Ariely captured a similar insight through a deceptively simple experiment. When people were asked to help a friend move house, most said yes, willingly. But when offered a token payment – a few pounds for the same job – enthusiasm dropped. Why? Because money, once introduced, changed the nature of the request. What had been a gesture of friendship became a poorly paid gig.
As Ariely writes, “When social norms collide with market norms, the social norms often collapse.”
Similarly Lewis Hyde writes about this in his 1983 best-selling book The Gift - that when something given from the heart becomes something sold on the market, its meaning changes. It ceases to be a bond and becomes a bargain.
True gifts exist outside the logic of the market. They are given freely and create bonds of reciprocity, not transactions. This puts them in contrast to commodities, which are sold and consumed. Instead, gifts circulate and generate relationships.
And unlike a commodity that decreases in value through use, a gift paradoxically increases in value the more it is given away.
Hyde’s work focused more on artists, rather than teachers like Mark. He saw in artists a cohort of people who often work in this same in-between space - producing work from an inner calling, but existing in a world that demands monetization.
When art, care, or service becomes transactional, it tends to lose something. It’s hard to put one’s finger on what that is, but from our conversation, I’d say it’s this: there’s a joy on both sides in freely participating in a serving relationship - both sides benefit intrinsically. When that is reframed as production and consumption, the benefit becomes extrinsic and the joy tends to leak out.
Where to start?
Mark has made a conscious decision to live 100% through Dana, and has shaped his life around that - no mortgage, no dependents. But what about you and me? I’ve got a mortgage and dependents - so how might we explore this space and serve without expecting anything in return?
For me the answer is obvious: at home.
Parents don’t invoice their children for meals, hugs, school runs, or midnight wake-ups. Partners don’t tally hours of emotional labour or childcare - well mostly! Even the family dog, in its way, gives and receives loyalty and warmth without a thought to compensation. Service at home operates outside of market logic.
And it’s also within these domestic spaces that we often experience our deepest fulfilment. The child who wraps their arms around us without prompting. The meal cooked without fanfare. The unseen kindness that becomes routine. These are the moments people remember when life draws to a close.
The sociologist Viviana Zelizer has long argued that we misunderstand the boundary between money and intimacy. It's not that the two can't coexist, she says, but that when market values replace moral ones, relationships can become brittle.
I think we all know this. As soon as we find ourselves keeping a tally of contributions in a relationship - of feeling that others are taking more than we are putting in - then that relationship is already starting to break down - joy has been lost and love eroded.
Expanding out from the home
What if the principles that guide our most loving spaces - generosity, attentiveness, patience - could guide our work in the world too?
One way to try is by expanding those feelings of love to others - from kin to kith.
When Mark joined us on retreat, we practiced one of the Buddha’s own teachings - metta meditation - whereby you gradually extend “loving kindness” from self and family, outward in ever growing circles. In some variations you even focus on enemies. It sounds woo woo but it is actually deeply pragmatic. I can attest to how routine practice can change one’s entire outlook. And science backs this up. Neuroimaging studies on meditators practising metta show enhanced activation in brain areas involved in emotional processing and empathy.
It’s like gym work for empathy.
A second way you can get some Dana in your life is through a hybrid model.
As Mark put it: "You can be in a system of transactions and still relate to your work as service. But it takes awareness." I spoke to another therapist some time ago who really struggled with charging for his work and found the job of marketing his work really unpleasant.
Some therapists offer sliding scale payments. (Headspace used to run a “buy one, give one” model, that gave a free subscription to someone in need every time someone paid for one.) Some creators run donation-supported newsletters or podcasts. The open-source movement thrives on volunteer contributions. And even within corporate settings, there are those who reclaim moments of genuine, unbilled service: an act of kindness, a mentor’s time, a quietly given favour.
Mark suggests starting small. Offer something freely. Not for attention. Not for leverage. But to remember what it feels like.
"When we live from generosity," he said, "everything is better. We feel abundant. We see beauty. We come alive."
This is 100% my experience. Give something away and you will find abundance.
No shortcuts
Note that I said “give something away and you will find abundance”, not “give something away and you will get abundance.”
Unfortunately if you enter into these experiments with cynicism - with the expectation of some sort of “return on investment” - it undermines the value. Mark talked about serving with a “full heart” - a common phrase in buddhism. Just trusting that the universe will provide.
The book Give and Take, by Adam Grant is a great read, with lots of rich data about how and why Givers do better in life than Takers. However it stops short for me, because Grant’s abiding message is that Givers do eventually take a better result. The book sits on the business / self-help shelf, where people are trying to find tools and techniques to thrive according to the rules of this world. His book frames giving as a way of achieving the long-term goal of taking success. (After all the subtitle is “a Revolutionary Approach to Success.”)
Although a lot of Grant’s examples will be giving authentically. It’s just that the book frames giving as a shortcut to getting.
What Mark is doing is much more radical. He has stepped outside of those rules and audaciously gifted all his knowledge for nothing, and living off faith in others that they are willing to gift in return. And it’s inspiring to see him making it work.
The Takeaway
Serving for money isn’t wrong. But it is different.
It risks changing the nature of the relationship. It introduces incentives, expectations, and sometimes, distortions.
And in a world saturated by market logic, it’s easy to forget: not everything valuable needs a price tag.
Some things grow in value precisely because they are given away.
Maybe service is one of them.
And maybe the quiet abundance we find in our homes isn’t just a private miracle. It might be a public blueprint too.