The world’s a rough place… getting rougher.
Most of the blame usually goes to shitty behavior. The bad feed on good, exploiting trust and generosity, making themselves stronger while leaving the better worse.
Don’t get me wrong: this fucking sucks. The once open-and-honest closing themselves after being burned is high tragedy. It hardens hearts and darkens souls. It makes life less.
But there’s something else. Something worse.
Something more subtle but way more poisonous.
…
Doing good’s usually not great.
It tends to be rewarded badly… if it’s rewarded at all.
It goes unacknowledged at scary rates. A lot of good acts are met with… nothing. Not even a quick “thank you.” Just… whatever.
A lot of times it’s worse than nothing. A lot of times people become aggressively entitled – once shown kindness they expect more and better of it. “You did this for me, now you should be willing to do that because c’mon you’re a good person right?”
…WTF? No. Wrong reaction.
But that’s not the worst thing.
The worst thing is minding the social power gap. Having to carefully meter out just how much good you give to others to maintain attention and balance in a relationship.
The sad truth’s that doing for others is socially dangerous. Making more effort signals you feel you need to do more to be worthy of the relationship. Calibrated good is great, but too much is seen as weak and supplicating… it doesn’t take much before respect is lost, boredom arises and entitlement ensues. Whoever makes less effort in a relationship has more control.
In the professional world, too much goodness means becoming a work dumpster, handling the overflow other less-agreeable employees aren’t willing to do (and contrary to popular belief rarely leads to raises or promotions). In the friendship world it means making more effort while getting worse treatment. In the romantic world, too much goodness (especially too soon) means the other person gets bored and either disappears or pays the wrong kind of attention.
In other words, good’s a slippery, booby-trapped slope. You don’t wanna be a dick… but you definitely don’t wanna be a chump.
Sad.
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Let me get out in front of it:
“…But you don’t do good things for reward! You do them because it’s the right thing to do and trust fate to pay it forward!”
…I mean, really?
Telling this to people whose good has gone unacknowledged or badly-rewarded is essentially telling them to just deal with it and blindly hope for better. It’s cold comfort that rightfully makes people think twice about future sacrifice for others. It’s not wisdom – it’s insanity.
You don’t do good things for reward, no… but they should be rewarded. Validating and rewarding good is the best way to encourage more of it – not fake pats on the emotional back.
And obviously you can’t always expect perfect one-for-one reciprocity… but you should expect equivalent reciprocity over time. Not having that’s a toxic relationship dynamic that socially poisons the person on the wrong end of the power balance. On net it puts more bad than good into the world.
FINALLY: The REAL Problem…
Let’s be honest:
It looks good and feels great to have others do for you without doing for them in return. It’s a pillar of ego and baller culture – “It-just-came-to-me-cuz-I’m-awesome.” The more others do for you without you doing for them, the more power and influence you show, which impresses more people, which increases your power and influence. There’s a reason subjects come to and bow before royalty…
…and this is the primitively dirty, dark psychological motivation behind a lot of fucked-up behavior that passive-aggressively bleeds others for the power position.
So let’s go ahead and spend some time pondering the wisdom of this… maybe try to grow out of being impressed by or rewarding it.