There Is No Free Luau

I recently dreamed that a high school friend persuaded me to go with him to Hawaii. The appeal was that he had discovered a life hack: We could attend Hawaiian luaus—traditional feasts—for free. He had somehow discovered a loophole in the airline tickets that allowed us to attend any luau we wanted and gorge ourselves to our hearts’ content without paying a dime.

I was intrigued. So off I went, jumping from one island to another in pursuit of the free buffet.

But things didn’t go as planned. We would arrive at a luau, load up our plates, and gradually the mood would change. The paying customers began glaring at us. Eventually someone would mutter, “Freeloaders.”

My friend was undeterred. He ate with tremendous pleasure. Roast pig, rice, pineapple, whatever appeared before him disappeared into his mouth. The hostility seemed to improve his appetite.

I was different. I felt guilty. I wasn’t wanted, after all. But somehow I had committed myself to following my friend on his eating adventures. Feast after feast, we were greeted with increasing hostility. Soon the paying customers began sticking toothpicks into the food with little flags displaying the price of each item. Apparently they wanted my friend and me to understand precisely how much our free lunch was costing everybody else.

I stopped eating altogether.

My friend continued to gorge himself without so much as a sting of conscience. I sat there surrounded by roast pig and tropical fruit while strangers glared at me as if I had personally engineered the collapse of Western civilization. Eventually they knew I wasn’t even eating, but that didn’t matter. My mere presence made them angry. I had become a symbol of everything wrong with the world: a man sitting beside a buffet he hadn’t paid for.

Meanwhile, my friend was happily feasting on roast pig. If anything, the fact that it was free made the pig taste better.

The dream taught me something about the meaning of “free.” Something can be legally free and still exact a price. I had the legal entitlement to the food, but I couldn’t bear the ill will of the people who had paid for it. Their anger became the bill. My friend and I had discovered the same loophole but inhabited completely different moral universes. I experienced every hostile glance as an invoice. He experienced every hostile glance as seasoning.

By the end of the dream, I understood that I could never become a true freeloader. I simply didn’t have the stomach for it.

My friend did.

And he was going back for seconds.