🌀 Split It Into Four

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It's the weekend before Thanksgiving, and the cart is heavier than the budget. Turkey, two boxes of stuffing, the good butter, a pie you'll pass off as homemade. The total comes to $187.40, and under it a small button offers to split it into four.

You tap it. Four payments of $46.85: one today, the rest every two weeks. The turkey will be gone by Saturday. The last payment lands after New Year's.

You'd call it splitting the bill. Regulators call it a loan.

In a London museum sits the stone that cracked hieroglyphs. Between a teenage king's titles and a long list of temple honors, it records what he did about money people owed. What did a 13-year-old pharaoh understand about debt that the checkout screen doesn't?

Ptolemy V was 13 when priests from temples across Egypt gathered at Memphis in 196 BC to mark the first anniversary of his coronation. His family had spent years fighting rebels in the Delta, and parts of the south still weren't back under control. The priests passed a decree honoring him and had it carved in three scripts: the priests' hieroglyphs, the everyday demotic and the government's Greek. One copy, a granodiorite slab now in the British Museum, turned up in 1799 when Napoleon's soldiers dug foundations for a fort near el-Rashid, which Europeans called Rosetta.

We know it as the key to hieroglyphs; its authors cared more about the list. The king, it says, had canceled the many debts people owed the crown and freed those held in prison or under accusation for years. He'd cut some taxes and erased others so the country might prosper, and people who'd turned against the throne during the unrest could come home to their old property.

Read it as a ritual and the function is plain. A shaky young reign wiped part of the ledger to buy a fresh start, and the priests carved the receipt where everyone would see it. The same list is full of gifts to the temples, which the British Museum's curators read as how the king kept the priests loyal.

The forgiveness had a hard edge, though. The crown canceled what the crown was owed. On what neighbors owed each other, the stone is silent.

So what is an unpaid debt? The stone and the checkout screen give opposite answers.

To the Ptolemies, it was a political problem. A farmer drowning in arrears might abandon his field or join the next revolt, and a dynasty that needed grain, soldiers and loyal priests couldn't afford that. Only a creditor with something bigger to protect can forgive in public. The crown was owed the money, but it needed the country more.

We file an unpaid debt under character. Our moral language grew up inside the ledger. In German, Schuld means both guilt and debt, and the King James Bible renders the Lord's Prayer as a request to forgive our debts. Once owing is a moral condition, a missed payment turns from arithmetic into a small sin.

Sins get penance. The late fee is penance with a price tag, charged automatically to the person who was already short. Groceries make it sharper: a debt for a sofa leaves you holding a sofa, and a debt for dinner leaves you holding a receipt.

A private lender answers to a portfolio. So forgiveness survives, but it moves indoors. It happens one account at a time, quietly. From a lender's seat, a public amnesty would only teach every borrower to wait for the next one.

Groceries have moved onto the installment plan fast. LendingTree's 2026 report found 29% of BNPL users have bought groceries with it, up from 14% two years earlier, which puts food third behind clothes and gadgets. It reaches well up the income ladder: 33% of users earning $100,000 or more have done it. And 54% of users agree they couldn't make ends meet without these loans.

The payments slip. In March, 47% of users said they'd paid late in the past year, up from 34% in 2024, though most late payers were a week or so behind.

The penalty is small and steep at once. The CFPB put the average BNPL late fee at $9.99 in 2023, when the average loan was $135. On a grocery run that size, one missed installment of about $34 can draw a fee worth nearly a third of it.

Then comes the twist. In LendingTree's September tracker, 89% of borrowers who asked to have a late fee waived got it cut or erased. Forgiveness still exists. It just arrives one request at a time, for whoever thinks to ask.

Quote: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850).

Study: Using bank data on 10.6 million Americans, researchers found new BNPL users saw overdraft charges, credit card interest and fees climb quickly compared with nonusers (deHaan, Kim, Lourie and Zhu, Management Science, 2024).

Artifact: The layaway ticket. The store kept the goods in a back room until the last payment, and every December strangers paid off other families' tickets, $432,635 at two Atlanta Walmarts in 2018 alone. In 2021, Walmart dropped holiday layaway for Affirm.

If lenders already forgive quietly, one fee at a time, what would change if they announced the forgiveness out loud? And why does asking for it still feel so much like a confession?

The Rosetta Stone is famous for teaching us to read hieroglyphs. Its priests wanted it read for another reason: so everyone, in three scripts, would know the slate had been wiped and who had wiped it. Forgiveness was a public act, set up in temples for anyone to see.

We still forgive. Lenders waive fees one borrower at a time, for the people who think to ask. What went missing is the stone, the shared moment when a society decides some debts matter less than the people carrying them.

So split the turkey if it helps. If the third payment slips, ask for the fee back; nearly nine in ten who ask get it.

Egypt carved its forgiveness into stone. Ours sits behind a button marked Contact Us.

Forward this to whoever's hosting Thanksgiving this year. They might still be paying for the turkey in January.

Find yourself in the next one,

Eren.

The Receipts

The artifact

The idea

The numbers

The quote, the study and the artifact