One of my biggest pet peeves about human nature is around expectation. You do something nice for someone a few times and suddenly they expect the kindness. Now kindness from you is just normal, not a pleasant surprise. In fact, you owe them the kindness. You've created a debt for yourself. And if you cease in your kindness, you've now harmed them, you've taken something owed to them!
I think friendships develop when people keep this exchange going for a long time. You can trust that your friend is not going to take advantage of you.
I fail to understand why this is such a big problem in non-professional settings. Yes, if I do a nice gesture to my boss I do not want him to assume this is the new normal, and I'm expected to do this nice thing on a regular basis. If they want me to do it on a regular basis, I want them to declare this as part of my job description.
But friendship requires give and take. And, it seems to me, when you do a nice gesture to a friend, you're signaling them this is your end of the "give". As long as you stay friends I think it's expected of you that you'll continue doing yhings that are useful to your friend. Of course, you reserve your right to change the good deeds, but when you stop doing anything, it seems reasonable for your friend to question whether you're willing to continue the friendship.
That distinction is artificial IMO - you maintain relationship because you have something to gain in either case, be it work or friendship (different things tho). Its not like situation you have with kids or family where "unconditional love" is a thing.
So if friend expects nice guesture all the time, I will sooner or later think he is exploiting me (and other friends), has no measure and doesn't appreciate my time which will 100% of the time lead in my case to termination of the said "friendship".
>situation you have with kids or family where "unconditional love" is a thing
Even here you have to be careful.
True Story:
He had "made it" in the US with a "Green Card" and a promising future. His elderly parents were living by themselves in his home country and suddenly his Father passed away. Within a year he had to make a judgement call on whether to get back home to take care of his Mother (an ailing, helpless and needy woman) or continue with his life in the US. Filial piety, Affection and Love for his Mother made him choose the former option. The result? His job and career gone with an abandoned "Green Card" and nonexistent future. He has ended up as the sole caretaker and caregiver (living off of his savings) for almost a decade now. This is now the "norm" and the expectation is that he would continue doing it until the Mother's (or his) end. He is frustrated, angry with everybody (especially with his siblings) and is basically trapped for the foreseeable future.
So what did his self-sacrifice gain him? An emotional decision cost him everything.
This True Story sounds suspiciously specific.. as if you know this person (who went through with the self-sacrifice) up close and personal.. unless you are implying that this person is none other than...
In either case, please let 'him' know that there is atleast another human I know - who empathizes with your 'friend's' situation - someone who's been through somewhat similar stuff when her father was on the death bed - her self-sacrifice was also in vain and caused resentment against her siblings-with-excuses. However, she wisened up and acted practically when it came to her mother's demise. She wishes to recommend 'your friend' a movie[0] that captured some of the petty sibling problems that you may find relatable (won't solve it but then - Some problems are unsolvable). Also, it translated well from a local theatrical play into an AV medium with sharp & insightful dialogues.
> As long as you stay friends I think it's expected of you that you'll continue doing things that are useful to your friend.
There's a word for this: entitlement. It's a profoundly unpleasant character flaw. An entitled friend or family member is one who eventually wears you out, makes you resentful, and leaves them confused that everyone seems to avoid them. Don't be that person.
Right on the Money! More insidiously, if you get into this sort of mindset with Family and Relatives, there is a real danger of being trapped. Emotional Entrapment becomes Physical Entrapment and in many case leads to abuse.
I am reminded of this quote by Bette Davis;
“The weak are the most treacherous of us all. They come to the strong and drain them. They are bottomless. They are insatiable. They are always parched and always bitter. They are everyone’s concern and like vampires they suck our life’s blood.”
"And, finally, I am persuaded that no one ever achieves anything worth-while in this world unless he has so great a respect for his work that he compels all other men to respect it."
Distilled wisdom right here. On a tangent, old English is always a nice read. Sentences had more elegance.
I have no doubt that someone reading this ( and certainly, I , at 4 decades on this planet am in that club) badly needs to follow this line of thinking...
Yes I needed this. Setting boundaries enables you to do better. Too many times my work has been substandard because I've taken on too much. Saying no is hard for me but the alternative is often letting people down when I'm not able to complete on time.
There is a thrill to completing urgent last minute tasks but often it's just me bailing someone out who should have been more organized.
> ”You are thirty-five years old,” I said to myself. “More than half of your life has already been spent. Who is living your life, anyway? Is it actually yours?
Yeah, that’s why I don’t want to have a job with a boss.
If someone had shown me this 1922 article a decade ago, I'd have labeled him/her as cynical. In the present day however, this article surmises so much of what I've experienced in the past few years.
Another comment in this thread linked to a decade old discussion on HN around the same post, where folks discussed the 1922 article being possibly fictional (a 'business parable' as 1 comment mentioned). I couldn't prove or disprove either (and neither can any of us) but what I can do is - Create an account on HN after lurking here for close to 2 years and finally state my plight as truthfully and in as detailed a manner as possible (Advance apologies for long wall of text/rant ahead, please refer TL;DR at the end):
I started my career at a US-based Big 4 Consulting firm from their Offshore Tech Consulting subsidiary based out of a 3rd world South-East Asian country. At the risk of sounding arrogant - but please bear with me (arrogance is absolutely not my intention - I simply wish to provide background context so that folks from western countries with better Work-Life balance don't jump to conclusions about my situation): As per my workplace's performance metrics, I've been in the top 5-7% of Corporate performer (to be frank, Corporate Slave) for them throughout my stint there and while I admit, it is possible to game your way to the top (somewhat) mostly through glib talk and low technical knowledge, based on my self-awareness of my own shortcomings, in my own case, appraisals were simply a consequence of my ability to GSD (Get Shi..errm.. Stuff Done) and go above and beyond whenever needed - instead of massaging the egos of my corporate overlords.
Despite these efforts, I've found that getting so much work/automation done relative to my peers (specifically peers at my workplace, I am not comparing with peers at startups or FAANG-level orgs) only resulted in - surprise - more work on my plate! Also, most of the additional work was of equal or worse quality (I expected more impactful work as my role grew).
My reputation as the GSD guy caused several (not all) Senior Managers to over-commit to our Clients and pass on all the extraneous programming work to me. Several peers from different teams would reach out to me regarding questions they had regarding Client Data transfer from OLTP to OLAP systems using Jython programming (most of my work amongst other things) and I helped out almost all of them (The ones I couldn't help out - were asking for solutions that was out of bounds for the OLAP software.)
Mind you, helping peers and other teams wasn't completely out of the goodness of my heart but more based on a famous quote via Reddit - 'Today you, Tomorrow me'. Unfortunately, when I needed help for an obscure problem in my software suite, I did not get similar levels of help. It's not that these same people who I had once helped turned their back on me, it's that their replies ranged from: 'Wow! I've never encountered this scenario' to 'What insane demands is your Client/Snr Mgr making? This is too complex for our OLAP software to handle performance-wise, request the OLTP team to send the data in a different format.'
For the first 2-3 years, I kept my head down and kept doing what I did best. But as I started raising my voice around deserving better and more impactful tasks - tasks that lateral hires often got to work on as soon as they were assigned their first project, I was given excuses (sounded valid at the time) one after the other. At first, I gave my corporate overlords the benefit of the doubt - but with each passing month and increasing over-commitments, I slowly started realizing that I'm being taken for a ride. This part is the only part where it differs from the 1922 write-up - I was sinking my entire waking hours (and most weekends) into my workplace commitments and helping workplace peers - not helping random strangers - all this without seeing much in the way of returns - esp with regards to quality of work.
The last straw was when, despite burning myself out over frequent 60-85 hour work-weeks for close to 5 years, receiving accolades from the Client & my Project members post implementation and Go-Live and ending the previous 2 years at the top of the Corporate Slave charts , I was neither assigned the OLAP software that I had politely been requesting since the previous 2 years nor was my request for accelerating my promotion by a year acknowledged - the request was neither accepted nor declined, simply unacknowledged (or so I was told after the closed door appraisal - I have no way of knowing what actually transpired in that meeting)
Supplementary info: For those of you unable to ascertain why I put up with workplace mental stress for so long, workplaces like these (with very few exceptions) are more-or-less the norm in my country (I live in a 3rd world South-East Asian country in a megapolis heading towards an awkward sight of faux-1st world luxuries constructed adjacent to slums - basically *'Slum Lords' & 'Millionaires'* - you get the drift)
Of course, looking back, I should've left sooner but in classic 'Sunk Cost Fallacy' style, I erroneously kept holding out in the hopes that my situation would improve soon. After all, I thought - Why would my corporate overlords decline one of their top Corporate Slaves from career progression/impactful tasks since that would also benefit them in the long run ? It is far too late that I've realized that humans can have a bunch of irrational reasons to behave in weird self-justified ways - Perhaps in my case (speculating at the risk of sounding boastful), maybe my corporate overlords were simply afraid that I might leave for greener pastures if they allowed me to work on impactful tasks or accelerated my promotion.
I'm close to entering my 30s so I still have time to course correct, just as Bert finally nudged himself in the right direction.
TL;DR - Whether the 1922 article itself is fictional or not - is irrelevant, the advice in it is anecdotally timeless - since I have been the real life embodiment of that Bert - naïve, erroneously believing in the better angels of human nature and mostly (but not completely) a pushover - who despite excelling in my corporate work, saw the short end of the stick.
You are still young and hence my advice would be to train your mindset to look at the world "Realistically as it is" rather than "Idealistically as you want it to be". Learn to play the "Game" but don't lose your intrinsic character.
Some resources you may find helpful;
* Books on Power by Jeffrey Pfeffer (see my comment history for book names).
* Robert Greene's popular books (eg. The 48 Laws of Power).
* The classic "The Art of Worldly Wisdom" by Baltasar Gracian. Get the Penguin translation by Jeremy Robbins titled "The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence".
* The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod - Provides a game theoretic approach.
Ah, found a person of culture in my geographical proximity (relatively speaking)! Humans like you are hard to come by these days (or maybe that was universally true across the ages). Appreciate your practical recommendations. I never expected another human to ever read my experiences/rant amidst the constant barrage of bits on everyone's screens hence the delay in my reply. Let me break it down into palatable sections:
*My Lack of Nuance:*
From my previous message/rant, in an attempt to distill that wall of text into short paragraphs, I inadvertently skipped several nuanced takes - e.g., around my 'naïveté'. I feel it wasn't the 'teenage idealist' kind of naïveté where I imagined corporate life to be all roses, candy and everything dandy. My 'naïveté' was of the 'Quid Pro Quo Pragmatist' variety (somewhat still is, just dialed down and more cynical than earlier times) - you know the type - where I helps his/her peers+bosses to get end-results/succeed/move up their respective ladder and in return, some act selfishly and some others (not 'all' - that's the pragmatic part) in turn help me out in a similar fashion.
*Your recommedations:*
I've already read a couple of them at the start of my career - specifically 48 Laws of Power & Pfeffer's 'Power: Why Some People Have it' amongst other classics like 'Art of War' & 'How to Win Friends...'. Will surely look into other recommendations across your previous comments. Early on, I learnt to think critically & viewed these authors' wisdom/lessons as 'amoral blueprints' - to be wielded for selfish purposes by some psychopathic individuals but also used by compassionate people to unite & shield their 'us' folks against the 'them' group. But discussing these works with peers+bosses would almost always (with 2 notable human exceptions) yield 1 of 2 reactions:
1. Blank Stares followed by topic change - 'Robert Greene / Nietschze / _insert original, insightful poet/author here_ who ?'
2. A couple of idealists advising me against these 'evil' authors - 'Don't read them ! They're spreading everything that's wrong and evil with our human world; read positive and uplifting books only' or 'People like Greene are foolish authors serving ideas to all those psychopathic C-Suites'
The gist of all these 'realist' Machiavellian works distilled in 1 over-generalized sentence, lacking nuance, would be - Be Smart™ - which most (with few exceptions) humans conveniently boil down to - 'Be Selfish without overtly exhibiting the same'
In a separate unrelated comment, you recommended Dave Packard's speech from 1960 - the gist of that speech feels exactly what I would like to practise and subsequently preach - walking that ever-so fine line between idealism & pragmatism, short-term & long-term, details & big-picture stuff.
>E.g. Dave Packard: I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists simply to make money. While this is an important result of a company's existence, we have to go deeper and find the real reasons for our being.
Above advice and several paragraphs of that article emulate empty platitudes that most mediocre managers sing today - the underlying virtues are more-or-less non-existent in today's transactional world, or in the process of dying out across most organisations (both public & private orgs).
I would've been perfectly fine with my corporate overlords ignoring my pleas for help IF I were a mediocre performer, since I would've either reciprocally ignored or been incapable of - going above and beyond in my work commitments to them. I used to think the 'Goose that laid the Golden Eggs' was just a useful, universal story to warn children of the perils of greed. It's only after my sustained exploitation that I've realized that:
"Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see." ~Edgar Allan Poe
Feels like almost all adults (Mr Poe and few excluded) are simply grown-up children who mask their childishness & greed under the veneer of confidence & charity.
Knowing this doesn't fill me with any hope for humanity in the long-term because the biggest and most complex challenges (that don't have optimal substructures) that we face as a species cannot be solved just by applying 'The Greedy Algorithm' everywhere.
Guess the TL;DR summary of everything here for me (and any other teen/20 something who skims through this) would be just as you mentioned (in different words):
Shut up and Be Smart™
*Bonus Anecdote for posterity:*
I'm not sure if I was surrounded by luddites who simply hated reading or people who secretly read a lot but revealed little - At my firm, I had a habit of asking anybody I interacted with (if the conversation sustained beyond the usual small talk):
"What was the last non-fiction book(s) that you read and couldn't stop thinking about for the next few days?"
The most common reply outside of Harry Potter & A Song of Ice & Fire (Gosh, imagine my plight in pointing out that Harry Potter & ASOIAF is not non-fiction - with a poker face :| ) used to be one of:
1. 'I don't read much because books are a waste of my time - Twitter is where the real advice is at' (cue me indulging in an imaginary facepalm. All Twitter advice is ultimately mangled or morphed from these classics at the end of the day)
2. _Insert popular Biography_ deifying the public's current favourite human demagog- I meant- demigod.
3. Oh yeah - I started reading Sapiens/NNTaleb but found it too dense and boring so left it midway (Then why mention it if it did not compel you to think?)
4. 'Forget books, Did you check out the latest TV Series about ... That's so rad!'
On one occasion, a manager in his mid-30s beamed at me and told me - Yes I'm reading a non-fiction right now that keeps me awake at night ! My eyes glistened as I felt the tingly feeling of receiving an insightful book recommendation, until he took out and showed me a copy of 'Rich Dad Poor Dad' from his bag D: I consider myself fairly open-minded and mostly non-judgemental about people's choices, but this recommendation was akin to an 18 year old (of average intelligence) telling me that he's learning how to add, subtract, multiply and divide whole numbers.
