THE TRAGEDY OF A CASHLESS SOCIETY

In a society swept up by the latest industrial revolution, where “Visa wala Instapay?” ricochets from mouth to mouth faster than Cairo gossip, I couldn’t help but wonder: should I grieve this change?

One Thursday afternoon, somewhere between Street 210 and the mazalaan by Delight in the heart of Maadi, I found myself standing at the nearest koshk - wrist poised - not to pull cash from my pink hand-me-down wallet, but to tap and pay for the Cinnamon Trident gum I’d just asked for. 

No asking for change for a 200 pound bill, no frustrated sighs when they respond saying “roohi fokeeha feh delight”. Just a simple and quick tap of my phone on the card machine. 

Convenient yes, but as the guy from the koshk dropped the card machine and bent down to pick it up, my phone died, leaving me cashless and Cinnamon Trident Gum-less. We stared at each other in mutual disappointment. He shrugged. I surrendered the gum, and embarked on my walk of shame back home. 

Somewhere between Instapay, Apple Pay, and Everything Pay, we lost something kind of... human. That sacred little ritual of handing over a folded bill. A pause. A nod. A shared moment.

Because that 200-pound note had range. It might’ve survived a mango juice spill in Rehab, been stuffed in a 3edeya envelope, spent by a 16-year-old at Maadi Grand Mall on eyeliner for a doomed first date (he lives in Zayed, so obviously it’s not going anywhere), then ended up in the galabeya of 3am Ahmed, the street vendor known for selling Cairo’s best watermelons. He was able to get his kids a celebratory bag of Boreos on his way home. 

Before getting lost in Cairo’s business cycle, that bill lived lives. It soaked up heartbreak, hunger, joy, eyeliner, and juice. 

Now? I tap. It beeps. A soulless “transaction approved” pops up, and I walk away without ever wondering who touched that money before me, or who was meant to touch it next.

Convenient? Maybe. But convenience, as we’ve come to know it, has its own quiet casualties.

I used to think of cash as just that, a slightly tragic crumpled rectangle of faded ink and questionable germs and that it could make or break someone's day. But with its waning presence, I see it as Cairo’s unsung storyteller. A soft-spoken narrator passed from palm to purse to pocket, collecting traces of lives along the way.

After being used by 3am Ahmed, the 200-pound bill could’ve been handed over at a shawarma place at 2 a.m. by a university student, drowning in finals and mid-existential crisis. Or used by a tired mom to bribe her child into sitting still at the dentist. Maybe it sat crumpled and forgotten in someone’s jeans through an entire day at the office, being the sole witness to the tahzee2a he got from his boss, only to then be flattened out, smoothed against a thigh, and given to the sayes who didn’t really do anything or help park the car but still held out his hand for monetary reward anyways. 

What I’m saying is: cash has character.

It ages, it crinkles, it absorbs. It remembers. A tap, on the other hand, is a blip. Clinical. Efficient. But deeply forgettable. You don’t remember the time you tapped your phone to buy a bottle of water or a pack of gum. But you do remember being short 5 pounds and having a stranger behind you say, “el maradi 3alaya”. 

Those stories cease to exist when we replace it with a soulless tap from a dead phone.  And maybe I’m romanticising it, but maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s worth mourning the death of the humble banknote, not just because it bought us things, but because it connected us, one disgusting fingerprint at a time. 

Now, I leave the koshk gum-less, my dignity slightly frayed, and my dead phone heavy in my pocket, not just because it failed me, but because I let it replace something that once made Cairo feel like a shared story.

So before I would wonder, “If money could talk, how many stories would it tell?”

Now I pay silent taps of my phone and mourn the strangers I’ll never get to meet through the folds of a banknote, but alas therein lies the tragedy of a cashless society. 

By Malika Elshorbagy

Published June 13, 2025