Gratitude and Obligation

One of the easiest ways to get people to feel like they have to do things for you is to do things for them.

This is a continuation of the discussion of debt—one of the emotional dynamics of debt which make the idea so problematic.

It goes a little bit like this: you do something for someone you know they want. If, for instance, they’re also angry at the time, this works even better. Because you’ve given them something they want, they feel like they should do something you want. A clever person can exploit that to make someone feel obliged to agree with something they might otherwise reject. The more emotional the person feels about what they were given, the greater the advantage.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with feeling gratitude, if you know that gratitude is not obligation.

Beneath the dynamic of obligation is an idea: to owe someone, to be obligated, is a moral state. The idea is that, even when the obligation is positive, not acting the way the person you owe says you should makes you a bad person. It is bad to say no. It is bad to get a gift and not give someone whatever they want. You are bad if you don’t pay someone back.

If you look at it that way, you can see that doing something for someone is an awfully cheap way to buy them. A whole adult human being’s compliance, for a $7.99 Starbucks latte. That’s a hell of a deal.

I can’t speak for everyone, but it hurts my fucking soul to be that cheap. I’m either free to a good home or ruinously expensive.

There’s nothing wrong with being grateful, but be very careful of what the other person thinks they are buying.