> "regular people" tend to coast along on the back of others as a way of life...many will route their problems to a "smart friend"
The human animal's basic survival strategy is cooperation. I'd imagine your "regular people" friends should be willing to help you out with something not readily in your power (e.g. house-sitting). Because you are intelligent, you get a certain kind of request; if you had a big truck or big muscles, you'd get a different sort.
If you've helped people without the expectation of reciprocity or setting boundaries, you've created the dependencies. On the other hand, it sounds like you have a lot of favors you can call in :-)
My experience has been that when you go to call in these favors you get to encounter that person's boundaries. Often their boundaries are that they don't like to help in the same way that they ask for help.
I don’t see what the problem is. If you have helped someone a lot, and then call in a favor and the ghost you, you didn’t lose a friend. You lost a parasite.
It’s like when you lend money to someone and they avoid you to never pay you back. Depending on the amount that can be money well spent.
The problem is the transaction is unbalanced. They got help when they needed and refused to help when called upon. Someone took more than they gave and there's no real way to address the issue so the only sensible thing to do is to avoid putting oneself in such a position in the first place.
It's not a "transaction", it's a relationship: they are never perfectly balanced.
It's also hard to measure one's contribution in a relationship (hey, maybe they were a really good listener; or maybe they can't find time to help you move, but when your kids get sick, they'll move the world to get the best possible care for them?), so let's not go and introduce quick-and-simple rules for what definitely are relations on a case-by-case basis.
Yes, it is hard. It's okay if it's a little unbalanced. Thing is a lot of altruistic people end up getting stuck in a pattern they're there for everyone but nobody is there for them. That seriously hurts.
Yeah, I agree. It's a problem with the world. But it's not generally a problem you can solve.
The problem that you solve is information. You don't know who's trustworthy and who isn't. If I can give a small amount of help to someone in exchange for knowing if they are trustworthy or not, that's probably worth it.
The people that reciprocate you can keep in your life and they become valuable friends. I am more than happy with the tradeoff of sometimes giving people some help that they don't reciprocate in exchange for finding the ones that will.
> If I can give a small amount of help to someone in exchange for knowing if they are trustworthy or not, that's probably worth it.
That's a life skill I had to learn. I was raised believing that if I was a good altruistic person all that goodness would come back to me. Well, way too many times it didn't and it was extremely frustrating until I figured out how to deal with it.
Sometimes it's okay to be selfish. It stops people from taking advantage.
Sure, I'd love to have real friendships where friends stay by my side through the good and bad times. Unfortunately it turned out to be difficult to make good friends like that. So I've decided to never do anything that leads to these expectations and "you owe me" situations.
> I'd imagine your "regular people" friends should be willing to help you out with something not readily in your power
That was actually the trigger for me...a few years ago I needed a very small favor and literally not one person would help because it was just slightly inconvenient for them, at the same time it was a massive ordeal for me, (I had to take a week off work, rent a car, and drive across the country and spent two weeks in a terrible panic besides). Given how much time and resources I'd spent on every one of these folks I was completely shocked to say the least. Everyone gave an obvious and transparent lie as an excuse, saying something like "oh sorry, but hopefully you can find someone else".
I really picked up on this broadly shared idea that "someone else" is supposed to handle this. I really think a lot of the traits that produce "regular people" as I use the term here are this combination of laziness, irresponsibility, and a narrow focus such that they're truly only aware of their own wants and needs at any given moment. I guess things in modern society are so diffused nowadays that it is possible for people deflect a ton of responsibility on other people.
Put another way, most folks are just coasting by as efficiently as possible, but this strategy doesn't produce world class anything, nor deep knowledge nor expertise of any subject. And these are the people who will disproportionately be looking to others to solve their problems.
Another interesting thing I've noticed on this is that while I quickly fell off the radar after a just a few "sorry, I can't help" replies, these folks don't seem to have any trouble whatsoever dealing with each other. Sure, they complain about people quite a lot, about lies and excuses and last minute cancellations or whatever, but week after week it seems everyone in their social group is just fine with the situation.
The human animal's basic survival strategy is cooperation. I'd imagine your "regular people" friends should be willing to help you out with something not readily in your power (e.g. house-sitting). Because you are intelligent, you get a certain kind of request; if you had a big truck or big muscles, you'd get a different sort.
If you've helped people without the expectation of reciprocity or setting boundaries, you've created the dependencies. On the other hand, it sounds like you have a lot of favors you can call in :-)