Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Favor Economy is not always apples to apples


So pretend you and your friend go to lunch.  You discover when it comes time to pay the bill that you forgot your wallet or don't have enough to cover your share.  Your friend says no problem and covers you.

Now a month or two later the situation is reversed.   Let's assume you decide not to cover your friend for lunch, even though you have the money and no reason you couldn't cover your friend.  Now, this is an analogy so we're not really talking about lunches.  The lunch represents something a friend did for you, at  a certain expense and Level of Effort (LOE).  It might have been $20 and no big deal, or it could have been the last $20 the person had or $20 earmarked for something else.  And yeah, they chose to help you out but that is really a cop out if you go there.
I'll sleep with your ugly cousin if you clean my bathrooms for a month.  That's the same thing, right?

Because not only have you missed a chance to pay your friend back, but you are ignoring the fact that you kinda sorta owe your friend something.  And so a month or two later, it might not be the exact same thing that you can do for your friend, because in Life it never really is apples to apples, oranges to oranges. To be sure, if you cover your friend at Denny's they really aren't obligated to cover your rent the next month.   But hopefully it is something along a similar value and LOE.

Upon further expansion, I do wonder if that is why in the past some of the people I have helped out didn't return the favor?  Perhaps they literally thought they needed only return the $20 lunch, not the "$25 dinner" or "$18 movie".  Either that or some of the people I call friends really are classless dicks.

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