Some words of hard earned "wisdom": make sure the pendulum doesn't swing too far out in the other direction.

I went from being an accommodating person to an intense asshole - trying to dial it back now but it's hard, especially when you notice that people definitely respect you more for good or bad reasons when you're like that. Take it too far though, and it will of course go all the way around and bite you in the ass.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4969041

Through experience, I've come to believe that this holds true in long-term personal relationships, too. While many will tell you that compromise is the key to a successful marriage, I think that standing up for yourself and who you need to be usually is more important.

There's a needle on the gauge of life that experiences pressure to move from both directions. When you are too accommodating or compromise unequally, the needle moves towards you and establishes a new norm for expected behavior. Your job should be to push back just enough to keep the needle balanced at a point where you retain a full sense of self and the space within which to exercise it. That requires a strong sense of introspection and can take years of adult life to develop.

"4+4=11"

"No, 4+4=8"

"Oh, c'mon, Joe, don't be difficult."

"4 and 4 is 8, 11 isn't correct.

"Be reasonable here. OK, let's compromise on 9.5, OK?"

We'd be super weirded out if someone in front of us in the queue in the supermarket committed suicide so we could pay faster. Apart from that probably increasing checkout times for everybody -- just imagine the chaos -- we wouldn't even appreciate "the thought", we'd be like "how DARE you use me for this?". Most of us don't mind being catered to or even pampered, but we don't want others to just throw themselves away for us. There are limits, even though it's kind of invisible most of the time, there is a line where hurting ourselves too much to help others a little bit actually hurts society, and offends others, correctly so.

Last but certainly not least: this over-the-top, dysfunctional selflessness in the sense of having no self (or rather, not respecting one's self) attracts not only knights in shining armour, but mostly baaaad types. You might say abuse breeds abuse in that someone who for some reason is playing doormat is emitting pheromones for people who like to trample on others. I really don't mean this to victim blame at all, but it's sadly true. And the less you let others violate your boundaries, the clearer your sight becomes for what you can freely give for mutual benefit. E.g. don't spend 2 weeks to save someone 5 minutes, but do spend 5 minutes to save someone 2 weeks.

TL;DR: you can't be a good friend to others without being a good friend to yourself first.

“On the contrary, it is Christian in the very finest sense,” I replied. “What was it that Jesus said when his parents rebuked him for his failure to keep his engagement with them on that first journey down from Jerusalem? ‘Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?’ He demanded. He had work to do — great work and little time in which to do it. Even He was no exception to the eternal rule that achievement comes only through the subordination of every power to a great ideal; and that no man is really obliging who does not first discharge in full his obligations to his work.”

However, I get ideas brought to me from everywhere, incl. friends of friends of friends. I'm happy to provide detailed thoughts and notes but now I make sure to challenge the person and the idea.

If it's a good idea, I want them to do some work upfront before I put anything else into it. Sad to say that most people start really excited about their idea, then I'll note that there are companies doing the same or nearly the same thing already, that they need to differentiate, what it's going to take to compete, etc and they will get completely deflated. Most of the time there's no follow up. That's why most people can't be entrepreneurs.

I've helped out way too many people in the past only to have them give up so easily. So if you're in this camp - I'd recommend challenging those that want your help - it's a great filter and also a way to say yes and no at the same time. You'll end up wasting less time and you'll still be open to great collaborations and more rewarding experiences from helping others out.

Those people can go to hell. They will never give back. They do not for one minute believe in a social contract where both people invest in the relationship. They are just using you. Doing anything for them just signals that it is okay for them to use you. This is a terrible social contract to make.

You can still do nice things for other people because it serves something you believe in. Just don't agree to be anyone's bitch, ever, for any reason.

This was probably the best part for me. We have longer life spans and so we trick ourselves into thinking that we have more time to waste on things we don't really want to do. We can procrastinate all we want but in the end, we still come back to this question without a single clue of how to answer it.

Furthermore, the notion that an acceptable remedy to the problem that a company cannot have it's shit together enough to adequately service the occasional difficulties surrounding the transactions of its products is to impose upon me has become unacceptable in my mind.

I know this is going to sound entitled but think of it this way, it is also an entitled position to assume people should be obliged to fill out forms, perform extra steps or wait in line because of a mistake a company has made.

I'm not encouraging anyone to treat people like garbage but my threshold for corporate BS has become extremely low and I ask for issue escalation pretty fast if a company isn't fixing a problem.

Watching other people (esp my fiance) saying "no" ever so gently has me wondering how easy life could be if I were able to do the same. I'm practicing it, and I think I'm getting better at it. Telling the other person the root cause why you say "no" helps a lot to instill empathy for your situation. The root cause always stems from a need or necessity that you currently have, like need for rest/food/time to think/time to finish this or that task properly/... Even if you are lazy and simply don't want to help right now, remember that this laziness also fulfils one of your needs - probably you need to rest or think.

ADDED: Telling people that you just cannot help _right now_ also softens the blow. Also, if it's a customer then delaying might even be more beneficial than just declining - you might need the billable hours in the following week.

It seems to me the playing field is being extraordinarily leveled. When I was a bagger at a grocery store, nobody looked down on me. Maybe because of my town, but I was never expected to "serve" someone's whims - I was just expected to do my job, and when I did my job people thanked me.

Now whenever I'm out and about getting a thing done, I don't think of the people "serving" me as "serving me." I'm at the mechanic's, I'm pinging him for his expert advice. I'm at the carwash place, I'm asking them if they wouldn't mind doing the interior windows for a bit extra, etc.

Maybe I just am very lucky that I never underwent the brunt of service work torture because of my town, but is it still a "thing" to be asked to do a bunch of random shit at the convenience of others? Am I just so lucky in all of my jobs that everybody is respectful of eachother an their time?

Why am I the one considered “impolite” by not dropping everything and helping you immediately, if you haven’t bothered to do things like:

- Indicate everything you have tried already (or worse, you haven’t done any basic research yourself)?

- Consider the possibility that I can’t respond instantaneously because my Inbox has dozens of other items already? Or that I didn’t answer my phone or your text because I was actually busy, or in a bathroom, or due to some other totally reasonable explanation?

- Consider that you are basically asking for free help, when there are people who pay for my time?

- Show even the slightest interest in helping others yourself?

To them I am just an all nice fellow who is kind to everybody. I earned their gratitude but not their love and in the process I hurt people that truly care and love about me.

Always eager to please other people before I even think about how it will affect me. Would you like to work two doubles in a row and potentially go insane? Ah sure... sure I'd love to!

Hey man, I'd like to catch this bus so I don't walk 6 miles home "Oh sure but before that, can you do this one thing..." ahhhhh

What happens when you let people walk all over you. It's funny too when I observe other people say no or F-off, people remember that and don't ask them to do things... hahaha. Ah well.

Someday my balls will drop.

When did we lose the ability to have authentic relationships?

If someone needs your help and you have the capacity to help and they haven't burned you in the past, why not actually be human and help them? Perhaps one day you'll need help and they'll return the favour. If they don't without good reason, then next time say "hey, you know what, I was there when you needed help last time and when I needed help you were nowhere to be found, you flaked out on me because you didn't take my needs seriously." or whatever.

If you're hanging out with flaky people who give you bullshit excuses for not helping you out when you genuinely need help and you're not helping out when they genuinely need help then you don't have friendship, you have acquaintances.

Being a friend is being there when your friends need you and your friends being there when you need them. If one side of that relationship isn't being honoured, it's not friendship. One or the other of you is taking advantage of boundaries that aren't being enforced or respected.

Kudos to everyone for wanting more time for themselves to find value in what they do but when you get to the pinnacle of whatever it is you're doing and you realize you've cast aside your friends and relationships for whatever shiny thing it is that currently has your attention, I hope the shiny thing is more valuable to you than your friendships, because you'll have none.

Addendum: I don't want to devalue those that are selfless and just trying to scramble back a bit of time for their own selves, I get it, I'm an introvert, I need time for myself to do my own things too, but don't lose sight of the fact that human connection is where happiness and love lays. If the giving of yourself to make those you love happy isn't making you happy, then you should probably closely examine the quality of those relationships and either fix them or end them so you are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVMvQhxN_M8

what people tend to respect innately is a genuinely nice person who can instantly turn into a no-holds-barred asshole if bad intentions are detected.

Most people come into the world assuming that their desires are everybody's desires. We live life by the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." This obscures that there's often a wide variety in the things we would like others to do unto us, and that assuming everybody wants what you wants often leads us to do exactly what they don't want.

It was a revelation when my therapist told me "You need to show love in the ways that other people want to receive it, not the way you want to send it." It hadn't really occurred to me before then that things I considered really inconsequential - checking if she got home okay, or leaving the porch light on for her at night - might really matter to my girlfriend (now wife), or that things that I considered really important - like listening to my latest theory on reality, or showing enthusiasm when I show her my latest product demo - might be considered inconsequential by her.

Many people have this intuitive idea that service & favors are a zero-sum game, but in actuality, some actions cost you a lot less than the recipient benefits from them, and some cost you a lot more than the recipient cares. It makes a lot of sense to perform favors that are cheap for you but benefit the recipient a lot. It's on you to figure out how much the recipient cares and how much time & energy you can spare for them.

Manners are in fact detailed prescriptive means & methods for being submissive, or rather for sending submissive signals, as the default behavior in societies where there are more humans living together than normal, i.e. anytime after 1800 when the population really started to shoot upward and to urbanize. It ends up being very practical to train people to be submissive in an urban industrial society, because if you have a thousand supposed self-declared alpha-apes constantly fighting it out "out there," things become a mess very quickly.

Edit: to the respondents, I am intentionally keeping morality out of it (decency and so forth), because a strictly moralistic right/wrong judgment-based view didn't seem to be enhancing the parent's understanding. But dominance & submission, like morality, is just another narrow rubric for viewing the world, doesn't describe the whole world, and isn't the only way of describing the world. So it's best not to take it too far beyond a blurry big-picture view!

Here's a sample model: http://righttojoy.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Assertive-v...

Collaboration is value-generating. It takes more effort and yields more return. Rather than 'pushing back' you work together to understand what is important to each party and find ways to meet those needs. This must be built on an equal foundation - your needle in the middle - for most effective good-faith negotiation. Your partner needs to be reasonably intelligent and reasonable for this to work.

You need to teach people what's important to you, rather than expecting them to read your mind.

Highly recommend the negotiation book 'Getting to Yes' for a thorough treatment of these concepts.

My take would be - this is arguing within a nonsensical framework, and we are prolonging the hopefully last stages of the superstitious demon-haunted world era of humanity.

So, I think your point really was spot on. Introspection is critical.

People can debate these issues, arrive at different answers, and still get along at the end of the day.

When those issues are compared to math, where one side is automatically Right and the other side is automatically Wrong and you are Unreasonable if you don't agree... not so much.

A part of being a reasonable person is recognizing this and understanding that the process you went through to arrive at the opinion you hold is not even a little bit comparable to the rigor and certainty of the answer to a child's math problem. The comparison is inherently dishonest.

You might say abuse breeds abuse in that someone who for some reason is playing doormat is emitting pheromones for people who like to trample on others.

This is absolutely true. Perhaps some readers were confused by your metaphorical use of 'pheromones' to mean signalling in general. A great example of this is griefing behavior in MMORPGs (and trolling in general, but in games it's already quantified and thus far easier to measure). Most games implement some sort of safe zone and/or NPC policing function to prevent griefers from hassling new players to the point of wrecking the game, which is the griefers' underlying and often unconscious objective (so as to 'own' the territory of the game space even if this is poisonous to the growth of the player pool).

Denied the ability to pick on newbies, griefers then usually collect in small packs and lurk around entry-exit routes to danger zones (whether from NPCs or territorial conflict) where there's a possibility to target outcoming damaged players or incoming ones pushing up against their skill envelope. Griefers like to think of themselves as apex predators, but typically lack the self-discipline and strategic vision required to organize as such, so more often than not they occupy the same environmental as scavengers such as hyenas, vultures etc.

I haven't kept up with the latest research on this, but I recall that EVE had an economist on staff several years ago and I'd imagine that the larger participants in that market are open to or already working with sociologists, game theorists, and other quantitative social scientists to better understand the dynamics of their virtual ecosystem.

For 'nice' players (in games and in life) who don't comfortably slot into large teams, the usual advice is to be more of an asshole. And while that's partly true, being an armored up lone wolf will only take you so far. Unless the system as a whole is dysfunctional, individual lone wolves are never competitive against anything bigger than a small-medium team. However, lone wolves can team up and be very effective; to do so they (obviously) have to overcome significant trust barriers, but can succeed by maintaining smallish flat structures and growing hierarchies below those.

Also: the busiest doctor in town is the one who did not said "no my schedule is full" despite being overworked already.

[1] https://markmanson.net/books/subtle-art (quasi-NSFW)

You don't actually always have to be 100% truthful with everyone. (That will also serve you badly in other social situations, BTW.)

[1] Point being that even if people eventually find out that you did tell them a "white lie", they'll actually usually be very understanding because that's the societal norm and they realize that you were just trying to "spare them" from embarassment/awkwardness/losing face/whatever.

A lot of timid people are attracted to strong people. You say the things they wish they had the bravery to say, and they respect it. It's aspirational.

I used to not do this and wasted a lot of time in the process. Do you find it hard to shake the reputation you had from before? I know I do.

Of course, this is a lifelong and error-prone process :)

I.e "Can you just take on $LARGE_TASK?" -> "No, I'm currently overbooked. But I can put you in contact with X, who might be able to help"

"Can you fix dinner?" -> "No, I need to wrap this up. Maybe we can cook something together after?"

It doesn't always work - sometimes a plain no is really called for - but in many cases, it takes off the pressure of flatly declining.

I have gone through the same process. Maybe it's because I am getting old, meditation or I just don't care anymore, I have slowly learned what's really important to me. I am generally pretty accommodating but for some things I won't negotiate and just say "No" without any further explanation.

This seems to work reasonably well with most people.

I don't really know what I am trying to say but maybe it's to have your priorities figured out and be flexible with unimportant stuff but firm with important stuff. That is, stuff that's important to you, not somebody else.

Of course, it gets trickier in different situations for different reasons. But basically, people try to use shaming and emotional blackmail to get what they want, don't let them.

One other thing: I think about the fundamental attribution error / actor-observer bias a lot. You're an asshole because you won't do the thing I want, but when someone else asked me for a thing and I said no, it was because I was busy and etc etc. This dynamic influences so much of what people think about others and themselves.

With this reputation in place, people are much less likely to try to trick you into doing what they want, and more likely to try to get you to do things with them.

You have to be a little careful though. If you don't have much social capital to begin with, it could backfire into being ignored altogether. If you overdo it, it may also be counterproductive.

Someone who is almost always selfish may find they are the most respected when they accomodate.