You Weren’t Popular. You Were a Public Utility.

Nobody has ever called the water supply to ask how it’s doing.

Think about it. Every morning in Mumbai, millions of people open a tap and water comes out. Nobody says thank you. Nobody sends the pipeline a “Good morning” forward with a sunflower and a Bible verse on it. Nobody remembers its birthday. Nobody, in the entire history of this city, has ever turned on a tap and thought, wow, what a reliable friend.

But the day the water doesn’t come? Oh, now everybody has the number.

Now there are phone calls. Complaints. A society WhatsApp group with 147 unread messages, a secretary being blamed for things far outside his control, a photo of an empty bucket taken from three dramatic angles, and one uncle on the fourth floor who has typed “SHAMEFUL” in capital letters and is now waiting for someone to agree with him. Somebody suggests a meeting. Somebody else suggests a stronger meeting.

For 364 days a year, that water supply did its job and received absolutely nothing. On day 365 it failed once, and suddenly it was the most talked-about entity in the building.

That’s what it means to be a public utility. Nobody notices you while you’re working. Everybody notices the second you stop.

Some people live their entire social lives like this, and they never realise it, because from the inside it feels exactly like being popular.

You know these people. You might be one of them. Their phone is always busy. Everyone seems to have their number saved, sometimes under a nickname that describes their function. They are “the one you call.” The cousin who “knows computers.” The friend with a car at 2 AM when somebody has a 5 AM flight and “cabs are so expensive yaar.” The guy whose uncle knows someone at the passport office. The colleague who quietly fixes your Excel sheet ten minutes before the review. The friend who always answers, always listens, and somehow always has a contact, a solution, a spare charger and five thousand rupees till next month.

These people think they have a lot of friends.

Some of them do. Some of them have a customer base.

And the difference between the two is almost impossible to see while the water is running. A customer and a friend behave identically as long as the service is good. They both call. They both say “you’re the best.” They both remember your number. The difference only shows up on the day the tap runs dry.

Last week I wrote about my phone going quiet after I lost my job, and whether people had been calling me or my salary. This piece goes somewhere slightly different, and honestly somewhere more uncomfortable. That piece was about who stops calling when your circumstances change. This one is about the job you’d been doing for those people the whole time, a job you never applied for, never got paid for, and never noticed you had until you tried to resign.

It’s also about the part nobody likes to admit: that you might be somebody else’s water supply problem too.

Because a lot of the attention useful people receive isn’t affection. It isn’t respect either. It’s demand. And demand, seen from the receiving end, looks almost exactly like love. It has the same phone calls, the same warmth, the same “you’re the best,” the same urgency. The only thing missing is curiosity about you as a person. And curiosity is the one thing you never notice is missing, because you’re too busy being needed.

“Hi” Is Not a Greeting. It’s a Loading Screen.

Let’s start with the most dangerous message in the Indian phone.

“Hi.”

Just that. No question, no context, no emoji. Sometimes, if they’re feeling generous, “Hi bro, free?”

You already know what this is. This “Hi” is not a greeting. It’s a loading screen. Something heavier is buffering behind it, and the little spinning wheel is your own anxiety. Nobody sends a lone “Hi” at 10:43 PM because they’ve been lying awake thinking about your wellbeing. They’ve been thinking about their landlord, their laptop, their visa appointment, their cousin’s wedding that needs one more car, or the form that has a field marked “Reference (other than family member).”

And “free?” isn’t a question. It’s a booking enquiry. They’ve already decided you are.

Notice the strategy, too. The “Hi” arrives alone so that you reply first. Once you’ve replied, you’ve opened the counter. You’re now on the clock. Declining after you’ve already said “Haan bol” feels rude in a way that declining a direct request wouldn’t. It’s a sales technique, and the person using it usually has no idea they’re using it. They’ve just learned, through years of experience, that it works.

There’s a whole dialect here, by the way. “Busy?” means “I need about forty minutes of your evening.” “Quick question” is never quick and frequently not a question. “Can I call you for two minutes?” is a phrase that has never, in recorded history, resulted in a two-minute call. And “Long time!” from someone who hasn’t messaged in eleven months is not nostalgia. It’s a warm-up stretch before the request.

Now, to be clear, there is nothing wrong with any single one of those messages. People need things. Needing things is a large part of what being a person is. If your friend needs a lift to the airport and messages “Hi, free tomorrow morning?” that’s not exploitation. That’s Tuesday.

The problem is the shape of the whole chat, not any single message in it.

So here’s a small, slightly painful experiment. Open a chat with someone you think of as a friend and scroll up. Keep scrolling. If the entire relationship looks like a staircase of “Hi”s, each one followed by a request, a thank you, and then a long silence until the next “Hi”, you aren’t looking at a friendship.

You’re looking at a ticket history.

And you, my dear dependable friend, are the support desk.

The Compliment Is the Invoice Before the Invoice

If “Hi” is the loading screen, the compliment is the terms and conditions you agree to without reading.

Pay attention to how requests are packaged, because they almost never arrive naked. They arrive wrapped in something warm.

“You’re so good with these things.”

“You’re the only one I trust with this.”

“I didn’t want to ask anyone else, you know how people are.”

“You’ll understand, that’s why I called you.”

And the heavyweight champion of Indian requests: “Family hai na.” Two words that have moved more furniture, lent more money and attended more unwanted functions than any instruction in human history.

None of these lines are lies, exactly. Maybe you really are good with these things. Maybe they really do trust you. But notice the timing. The compliment shows up exactly thirty seconds before the request, like a waiter who brings the mouth freshener and the bill on the same plate. You’re being praised for the quality that’s about to be used.

This is what makes the useful person’s life so confusing. On paper, they receive an enormous amount of appreciation. People tell them they’re dependable, generous, brilliant, a lifesaver. “What would I do without you?” is said to them so often they could print it on a T-shirt.

But appreciation that only appears next to a request is not appreciation. It’s lubrication.

Here’s a test that’s cruel but accurate. When was the last time someone told you something nice about yourself when they didn’t need anything? Not at your birthday, where it’s compulsory. Not in a thank-you message after you’d already done the favour. Just randomly, on a Wednesday, with no transaction attached. “I was thinking about you, you’ve got a really good sense of humour.” “My mother still talks about how nicely you spoke to her at the wedding.”

If you can’t remember the last time, that doesn’t automatically mean you’re being used. Many people are just bad at expressing affection out of context, especially men, who would apparently rather fight a bear than say “I value our friendship” without a beer in their hand. But it’s worth noticing whether the nice words in your life arrive on their own, or only ever arrive escorting something heavier.

The other packaging technique is the emotional emergency. Everything is urgent. Everything is “just this once.” Everything needed to happen yesterday. Urgency is useful because it skips your thinking. When someone says “I’m in a really bad situation, please, I’ll explain later,” you don’t stop to ask whether this is the fourth “really bad situation” this year, or why the explanation never actually arrives later. You just help. That’s what good people do in emergencies.

And that’s exactly why some people have so many of them.

Congratulations, You’ve Been Hired. Nobody Told You.

Every one of these relationships comes with a job description. You were never shown it. You never signed it. There was no interview, no offer letter, no joining date. But somewhere along the way, you were hired.

It usually starts innocently. You lent someone money once and were nice about it. You helped a friend shift flats and turned out to be weirdly good at packing glasses in newspaper. You gave someone breakup advice at 1 AM and it actually helped. You fixed one laptop.

Congratulations. You’ve just cleared your probation period.

Now you have a post. And like most Indian jobs, the post comes with a designation that sounds impressive and duties that expand every year.

The Lender. Also known as “only till salary comes.” The Lender’s main skill is pretending not to remember. The borrower’s main skill is actually not remembering. Together they maintain a peaceful silence about a sum of money that both of them think about every single time they meet.

The Agony Aunt. Her job is to hear the same complaint about the same boyfriend for the fourteenth time, give the same advice for the fourteenth time, and watch it get ignored with professional dignity. She knows the boyfriend’s full name, his mother’s opinions and his gym schedule. The friend who calls her has never once asked how her own relationship is going. Not because the friend is evil. Because in that friendship, there’s only one microphone, and it isn’t hers.

The IT Department. Receives a photo of a laptop screen, taken at a 40-degree angle, with a thumb covering half the error message and the caption “what is this.” Also handles printers, Wi-Fi, “my phone storage is full,” and the eternal mystery of why Papa’s WhatsApp has 4,000 unread good-morning images. The IT Department doesn’t work in IT. He once installed an antivirus in 2011, and the family has never forgotten.

The Free Consultant. This one deserves special mention, because it’s an entire category of human suffering. Doctors get it at weddings: “Just one minute, beta, I’ve had this pain here since Diwali.” Lawyers get it about property disputes. CAs get it about taxes. Designers get asked for “just a small logo, nothing fancy.” Photographers get asked to “bring the camera, na, since you’re coming anyway.” And comedians, writers, musicians and every other kind of artist get the most beautiful word in the language of exploitation: exposure. “Do ten minutes at my sister’s sangeet, it’ll be great exposure.” Great. I’ll pay my rent in exposure. My landlord loves exposure.

The Airport Driver. Owns a car. That’s it. That’s the qualification. Owning a car in a friend group is like owning a projector in a college hostel. Your property becomes community property, and your evenings become community evenings.

The Introducer. Apparently knows someone at every company, and is expected to forward CVs he hasn’t read for people he barely knows, because “just put in a word yaar, they’ll handle the rest.” If the candidate gets the job, the candidate earned it. If the candidate turns out to be a disaster, it was your reference.

The Event Manager. Every friend group has one. Creates the WhatsApp group, picks the date, books the table, collects the money, sends four reminders, and is still waiting for two people to pay him back for the Lonavala trip in 2023. Is also, without fail, blamed when the restaurant is bad.

These jobs come with very strange terms of employment.

No salary. No leave policy. No working hours, which is why the Agony Aunt finds herself on duty during her own birthday dinner, nodding into her phone while her cake melts. No promotion either, because the only reward for doing the job well is more of the job. And no resignation process, because nobody admits the job exists.

But there is one HR process these roles do have. Performance reviews. And they only happen when you fail.

You can lend money eleven times, and nobody calls a meeting to appreciate you. Decline the twelfth time and suddenly there’s an emergency board meeting with a single item on the agenda:

“You’ve changed.”

I love this sentence, because nobody who says it ever investigates it. Maybe you’re broke. Maybe you’re exhausted. Maybe your mother is in hospital and you don’t have the energy to be anybody’s IT Department this month. Maybe you’ve just started valuing your time. They don’t ask. Because “you’ve changed” is not an observation about you. It’s a customer complaint. It means: the service I was receiving has been discontinued and I would like to speak to the manager.

Unfortunately, you are the manager.

The softer version is just confusion. “Arre, what happened to you? You used to be so helpful.” Used to be. As if you were a restaurant that changed its menu. Nobody asks whether the chef is okay. They just want to know where the paneer went.

And the passive-aggressive version is the most creative. It comes through a third person. A mutual friend mentions, very casually, that so-and-so “was a bit hurt” you couldn’t help. Your mother gets a call from an aunty who “doesn’t want to complain, but.” Suddenly your “no” has become a family news item, travelling through the WhatsApp grapevine faster than the original request ever did.

Here’s the detail that makes all of this complicated. A lot of us accepted the job because we liked being needed. We liked the phone ringing. We liked being the competent one, the generous one, the one with answers. Hold on to that thought. We’ll come back to it later, and you won’t enjoy it.

Being Needed Is the Cheapest Drug in India

Why do useful people put up with all this? Why does the Agony Aunt keep picking up? Why does the IT Department keep driving across the city with a pen drive?

Because being needed feels fantastic. At least in the short term.

There’s a particular glow that comes from being the person everyone calls. It’s a kind of status that doesn’t require a title. Your phone buzzing all evening feels like evidence that you matter. Being consulted on a cousin’s job offer, a neighbour’s property dispute and your friend’s sister’s marriage proposal, all in one week, makes you feel like a minister without a ministry. People stop talking when you speak, at least on the topics you’re useful for.

In India, we have an entire vocabulary for this. We don’t ask “do you know anyone who can help?” We ask, “Koi source hai kya?” Is there a source? A source is a person who can get things done: a hospital bed, a train ticket in Tatkal season, an admission, a faster passport, a building permission that has been stuck for eight months. And being somebody’s source is a kind of social currency. When your name is the one that comes up whenever someone says “koi source hai kya?”, you feel important.

You are important. But notice what kind of important.

A source is valued the way a good plumber is valued. Nobody wants to lose his number. Everybody recommends him. Nobody invites him to their daughter’s wedding.

That’s the trap. Importance and intimacy are two different things, and the useful person keeps mistaking one for the other. Being called often is not the same as being known well. Your number being saved under “Rohit Bank Wala” or “Sneha Doctor” tells you exactly how you’re filed in that phone.

There’s an even older version of this in Indian families: the earning member. Every family has one person whose salary, at some point, becomes the family’s infrastructure. Fees, weddings, hospital bills, renovations, the younger brother’s “business idea,” the uncle’s emergency. The earning member is respected, consulted, deferred to at dinner. He sits at the head of the table.

And very often, nobody in that family has asked him a single question about his own dreams in fifteen years. Not out of cruelty. Out of habit. He has been converted, gradually and lovingly, from a son into a system. Everyone depends on him, everyone is grateful to him, and almost nobody knows him anymore. He’s not lonely in the dramatic sense. He’s lonely in the administrative sense: surrounded by people who need decisions from him, and nobody who needs him.

The useful person is often the last to see this, because the attention never stops. It just changes shape. And attention, especially when you grew up feeling ignored, is very easy to mistake for love.

Here’s a simple way to feel the difference. Love is curious. Demand is efficient. Someone who loves you wants to know about your week, even the boring parts. Someone who needs you wants to know whether you’re free on Saturday. The first conversation wanders. The second has an agenda. If every conversation you have with a person has an agenda, and the agenda is always theirs, you aren’t in a relationship.

You’re in a meeting.

The Service Was Discontinued. So Were the Customers.

Here’s how most people find out which of their relationships were running on the job description. Not through some dramatic betrayal with background music. Through something completely ordinary.

You move. From Andheri to Thane, say. Nothing about you has changed except your commute and your opinion of the Ghodbunder Road traffic. And yet a chunk of your social life quietly evaporates, because it turns out some of your friendships had a delivery radius. You were a wonderful friend within five kilometres. Beyond that, the logistics apparently don’t work out. People who used to drop by “since I was in the area” are, it turns out, never in your new area.

You stop drinking. For your health, your wallet, your liver’s emotional wellbeing, whatever. You still go out. You order a fresh lime soda, sweet and salt, and you stay till the end. And within a few months you discover that your Saturday group was not, strictly speaking, a group of friends. It was a bar tab with attendance. Nobody says anything mean. The invitations just get vaguer. “We’ll see, yaar, probably just a chill evening.” Translation: you’re no longer the one who orders the second bottle.

You leave the job. Specifically, the job where you approved leave requests, or cleared vendor payments, or sat right next to the boss and knew things before everyone else. Former colleagues who used to bring you samosas from the canteen without being asked, who laughed a little too hard at your jokes in the pantry, who added you on Instagram the week you got promoted, are suddenly “so slammed these days.” Some of them were genuinely fond of you. Some of them were fond of your signature.

You sell the car. No more airport runs. No more “since you’re going that side anyway.” A surprising number of friendships turn out to have been, structurally, carpool arrangements with birthday wishes.

You get married, or have a baby, or start a business. Suddenly your evenings aren’t available, your weekends belong to someone else, and the people who relied on your free time find someone else’s free time.

Or my favourite, the college version. Every class has one person whose notes are complete, legible and colour-coded, with important points underlined twice and diagrams that look better than the textbook’s. For three weeks before every exam, that person is the most popular human on campus. People who have never spoken to them know their name, their hostel room number and their preferred photocopy shop. They get invited to the canteen. They get “you’re a genius, yaar.” Then the exams end, results come out, and the topper goes back to eating lunch with the same two people as always.

The topper learns something important in those weeks, even if they can’t name it yet. Popularity with a deadline isn’t popularity. It’s a seasonal business.

Nobody planned any of this, which is exactly what makes it so revealing. You didn’t set a trap. You didn’t run a loyalty test. Life ran the experiment for you, for free, with no ethics committee and no consent form.

Aristotle Worked This Out Without a Smartphone

This is hardly a new discovery. Roughly 2,300 years ago, in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle sorted friendships into three kinds. There are friendships of utility, where people are friends because they’re useful to each other. There are friendships of pleasure, where people are friends because they enjoy each other’s company, the way you love the friend who’s hilarious at parties. And there are friendships based on character, where you value the other person for who they actually are.

About the first kind, Aristotle was refreshingly unsentimental. Friendships of utility, he observed, dissolve easily, because they were never really about the other person. When one person stops being useful, the other has no reason left to stay. He didn’t say this angrily. He said it the way you’d describe weather.

Here’s what I find interesting. Aristotle didn’t say friendships of utility were evil. He treated them as a real, normal kind of friendship. Business partners, neighbours who help each other, colleagues who cover for each other. Those relationships are fine. They’re useful. That’s the point of them.

The problem isn’t the existence of utility friendships. The problem is when one person thinks they’re in a character friendship and the other person knows it’s a utility one. Only one of them has read the contract.

So Aristotle worked all of this out without WhatsApp, without blue ticks, and without a single cousin asking him to “just quickly check something on my laptop.” Imagine how bitter he’d have been with a smartphone. The Nicomachean Ethics would have been forty pages longer and had a chapter called “On the Man Who Says ‘Hi’ and Nothing Else.”

The Three Groups That Appear When the Tap Runs Dry

When the service stops, people tend to sort themselves into three groups. Not neatly, and not permanently, but clearly enough that you’ll recognise them.

The first group simply fades. No fight, no explanation, no goodbye. They were customers, the shop shut, they found another shop. You’ll see them liking your Instagram stories occasionally, like a former regular who waves at the restaurant from across the road. Honestly, this is the least offensive group. At least they’re consistent. They never pretended the relationship was anything more than it was. You did.

The second group gets angry. These are the people who had quietly started treating your help as an entitlement, so its absence registers as a loss, and a loss needs someone to blame. You’ll hear “you’ve changed” again. You’ll hear “I never expected this from you,” which is an incredible sentence, because the expectation was never agreed to by both parties. It was assumed, the way people assume the water will come tomorrow. Some of them will rewrite history: suddenly you were “always a bit selfish, honestly.” This group is painful, but it’s also the most informative. People don’t get angry at losing something they never felt entitled to.

The third group doesn’t change at all. They still call. They still send you that dumb reel at midnight. They still ask how you are, and, crucially, they ask the follow-up question. “And how’s your father’s knee?” “Did you ever hear back from that interview?” They were never there for the service. They were there for you, and they’re mildly confused that you seem so surprised and grateful about something as ordinary as a phone call.

That third group is usually smaller than you’d like. It’s also usually bigger than you feared, because the bitter version of this story always forgets to count them. When people say “everyone left,” it’s almost never everyone. It’s the loud, numerous first and second groups drowning out the quiet third one. The third group never makes announcements. They just keep showing up, which is exactly why they’re so easy to overlook.

Before You Declare Everyone a Snake, Check Your Own Call Log

Now the uncomfortable part. Put the pitchfork down for a second and open your phone.

When did you last call your friend who’s a doctor? Was it to ask how she’s doing, or was it because your kid had a fever at 11 PM and you didn’t feel like sitting in a clinic with a token number? When does your CA friend hear from you? Be honest. Is it, by any chance, mostly in July, about a week before the tax filing deadline, with a message that begins “Hi! Long time!”?

Your cousin who works for an airline: when did you last speak about anything other than upgrades? Your school friend who became a lawyer: does she hear from you at any time other than when a landlord is being difficult? That guy from the gym who knows a guy for cheap car insurance: do you even know his surname?

Congratulations. You are somebody’s “Hi.”

Everybody is somebody’s utility. If you read the first half of this article and immediately thought of five people who use you but zero people you use, the article hasn’t failed. Your memory has.

This is one of the most reliable bugs in the human brain. We remember every favour we gave with the precision of a bank statement: the date, the amount, the inconvenience, the fact that we cancelled dinner plans for it. And we remember every favour we received like a dream we had once, vaguely, in college. In a classic 1979 study, the psychologists Michael Ross and Fiore Sicoly asked married couples to estimate how much each of them contributed to everyday household activities. For most couples, the two partners’ shares added up to more than 100 percent. Nobody was lying. Each person simply remembered their own effort more vividly. Everyone is the hero of their own ledger.

So when you feel used, it’s worth asking a slightly humiliating follow-up question: by whose accounting?

This matters for another reason too. Getting something out of a relationship doesn’t make it fake. Every relationship gives you something. Company. Laughter. Advice. A place to be stupid without being judged. Someone to complain to about your manager. Someone who comes to your terrible open mic, sits in the front row and laughs in the right places, even at the joke that’s clearly not working yet.

If you insisted that friendships give you absolutely nothing, you wouldn’t end up with pure friendships. You’d end up with strangers.

Your Bank Is Exchange. Your Best Friend Is Supposed to Be Communal.

The psychologists Margaret Clark and Judson Mills drew a useful line through all of this back in 1979. They separated two kinds of relationships.

In exchange relationships, people give benefits in return for benefits they’ve received or expect to receive. Your relationship with your bank is exchange. So is your relationship with your electrician, your landlord and the guy who sells you vegetables. Nobody is embarrassed about this. You pay, they deliver. Tidy.

In communal relationships, people give in response to the other person’s needs, out of genuine concern for their welfare, without calculating the return. Your relationship with your best friend, your partner or your mother is supposed to work like this.

Here’s the part I love. Clark’s research found that in relationships people want to be communal, they react badly to being repaid for favours and to being asked for repayment. They also don’t keep careful track of who put in what. In other words, keeping score is itself a sign that something has gone wrong. The healthier the friendship, the worse the bookkeeping.

You already know this instinctively. If your friend helps you shift house on a Sunday, carries your fridge up three floors and stays till 9 PM, and you immediately GPay him two thousand rupees “for petrol,” you haven’t been fair. You’ve been weird. You’ve turned your friend into a tempo service. He’ll accept the money, probably, and something small in the friendship will quietly change shape. Next time he might even hesitate before helping, because now he’s not sure whether this is a favour or a gig.

The Dabba Rule

Indian households understood all of this long before any psychology department did, and they encoded it in a steel box.

You never return a neighbour’s dabba empty. Ever. This is not a suggestion. It’s practically constitutional. She sends sheera in a steel box on Ganpati, the box goes back three days later with poha in it. Then it comes back with modak. Then it goes back with something your mother made specifically because she knew the neighbour liked it.

Technically, that’s an exchange. But nobody is weighing the poha. Nobody is raising an invoice. Nobody says, “Aunty, the sheera was 250 grams and this poha is only 180, please adjust.” The point isn’t equal value. The point is that the box keeps travelling in both directions, for years, until nobody remembers whose dabba it was in the first place. Half the steel boxes in Mumbai kitchens have someone else’s name engraved on the bottom.

That’s what healthy reciprocity looks like. Not a ledger. A rhythm.

So the problem was never that someone benefits from you. Of course they benefit. You benefit from them too. The problem is when the dabba only ever travels one way. When you are always the one sending sheera, and every time the box comes back, it comes back empty, sometimes unwashed, occasionally with a note asking if you could also make some for their cousin.

That’s not a communal relationship. That’s not even an exchange relationship, because exchange at least involves paying. That’s a third, worse category: a relationship that uses communal language (“family hai na,” “we’re like brothers”) to get exchange-level benefits without paying exchange-level prices.

It’s a vending machine with a sentimental sticker on it. And the only feedback you ever get is someone kicking you because the chips got stuck.

Lazy, Busy, or Using You? These Are Three Different Crimes.

Before you go and delete half your contacts, a few distinctions. Because not every disappointing friend is exploiting you, and treating them all the same way is how you end up alone and very self-righteous about it.

Passive is not predatory. Every friend group has an organiser: the one who makes the group, picks the date, books the place, sends the reminder, sends the second reminder, and finally just goes ahead and books it anyway. When the organiser stops organising, the group often just stops meeting.

That feels like abandonment. Usually it isn’t. It’s laziness, plus the comfortable assumption that someone else will make the plan, plus the fact that most people are genuinely terrible at initiating. Many of those friends were happy to see you every single time. They just never thought of themselves as the ones who start things.

A passive friend who never initiates is annoying. An extractive friend who initiates only when they need something is a different animal entirely. One forgets to call. The other remembers perfectly well, and calls only when it’s useful. Don’t put them in the same cage.

There’s a simple way to tell them apart. When you reach out to the passive friend, they’re delighted, they show up, and the conversation flows both ways. When you reach out to the extractive friend with nothing to offer, the conversation is strangely short, and somehow ends with a request anyway.

Friendships decay. That’s not betrayal, it’s physics. The Oxford psychologist Robin Dunbar, who has studied friendship networks for decades, has argued that friendships have a natural decay rate when there’s no contact. In one study, Dunbar and Sam Roberts followed people’s entire personal networks over 18 months as they went through a big life transition, and found that family relationships and friendships behaved very differently. Friendship quality declined unless people actively put effort into keeping it going.

This has an awkward implication. Some of the people who “disappeared” when your life changed didn’t leave because you stopped being useful. They left because the structure that kept you in contact disappeared: the office, the college, the building, the Saturday group. Friendship, unlike family, doesn’t run on autopilot. Family will tolerate a three-year silence and still invite you to the wedding. Friends, without contact, slowly become people you used to know.

So when a friendship fades after you move or change jobs, it’s worth asking honestly: did they abandon me, or did both of us stop maintaining the thing? Sometimes the answer is the first. Quite often it’s the second.

Busy isn’t betrayal. Someone with a newborn, a sick parent, a failing business or a manager from hell may have no bandwidth for you for months. They’re not using you. They’re drowning. The tell is not whether they’re available. It’s how they behave when they surface. A drowning friend comes up for air and says, “Sorry, I’ve been a ghost, how are you?” An extractive one comes up for air and says, “Hi, free?”

A season is not a pattern. A friend whose marriage is falling apart is going to take more than they give this year. A friend who just lost a parent might call you at 2 AM for weeks. That’s not exploitation. That’s literally what friends are for, and one day it’ll be your turn to be the difficult, needy, repetitive one. If you’ve never been that person for anyone, you’ve either been very lucky or very lonely.

The question isn’t whether the balance is equal this month. It’s whether, over the years, the dabba ever comes back. Friendship isn’t a monthly bank statement. It’s more like a long-term relationship with a cricket team. Some seasons are terrible. What matters is whether, across a decade, you’ve both turned up for the matches.

The Reward for Finishing Your Plate Is a Second Helping

Every Indian child learns this at the dinner table, usually from a mother or an aunty holding a ladle like a weapon of love.

If you leave food on your plate, you get a lecture about starving children, the price of dal, and how your grandfather walked eleven kilometres to school. If you finish your plate, there’s no applause. No medal. No “well done, beta.”

There’s more food.

The reward for a clean plate is a second helping. And if you finish that, a third, accompanied by the phrase “arre, ek aur roti, kuch nahi hota.” The only way to stop the food is to leave some on the plate. In other words, the system punishes completion and rewards a little strategic failure.

Competence works exactly the same way.

Do your work well and you don’t get rest. You get more work. Answer every late-night call and you don’t get gratitude. You get later calls. Solve one family problem efficiently and you’ve just been appointed Head of Family Problems, a lifetime post with no pension and no retirement age. Be the person who never misses a deadline, and watch how every deadline that matters slowly migrates to your desk.

Meanwhile, the colleague who “isn’t very good with Excel” goes home at six. The cousin who “doesn’t understand all this paperwork” never fills a single form. The friend who “is just so bad at planning” never plans anything. Incompetence, carefully maintained, is one of the most effective boundaries ever invented. Some people have turned it into an art form. They’re not lazy. They’re strategically helpless, and it works brilliantly, because there’s always a useful person nearby who can’t bear to watch something being done badly.

Science Confirms It: Good People Get More Work

This isn’t just my paranoia talking. In 2015, Christy Zhou Koval, Michelle vanDellen, Gráinne Fitzsimons and Krista Ranby published a set of studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology with the gloriously accurate title “The Burden of Responsibility.”

They looked at people with high self-control: the disciplined, dependable types who get things done without being chased. Most research celebrates these people, and fairly so. Self-control predicts all kinds of good outcomes. But Koval and her colleagues asked a different question: what does being reliable cost you socially?

The answers are almost comically familiar.

In one study, observers assigned bigger workloads to people with high self-control. In another, observers believed that high self-control people spent less effort on their tasks than people with low self-control, even though the high self-control people themselves didn’t see it that way. And when the researchers surveyed real people about their real lives, those with high self-control reported feeling more burdened by others relying on them, both at work and in romantic relationships. In the relationship study, that burden went along with feeling less satisfied with the relationship.

Read that middle finding again, because it explains an enormous amount.

People don’t just give the reliable person more to do. They assume it costs them less. “Arre, for you it’s nothing.” “You’ll do it in five minutes.” “You’re so good at this, it won’t take you any time.” The person who’s good at something is assumed to be doing it effortlessly, which means nobody feels they owe much in return. The more skilled you are, the more invisible your effort becomes.

Your competence becomes the excuse for everyone else’s lack of gratitude.

Think about what this means in a family. The sister who’s “good with money” ends up managing the parents’ finances, filing their taxes, renewing their insurance and arguing with the bank, while her brother, who “doesn’t understand all this,” drops by on Sundays and is greeted like a returning soldier. She’s doing a part-time job. He’s doing a visit. And everyone, including the parents, genuinely believes she doesn’t mind, because she seems so calm about it.

She seems calm about it because she’s competent. Competence looks like ease from the outside. It isn’t.

So if you’re the dependable one and you feel quietly exhausted, weirdly resentful, and then guilty for feeling resentful, you’re not being dramatic. You’re experiencing a documented side effect of being good at life.

The Uncomfortable Part: You May Have Built This Yourself

Now for the part I promised you wouldn’t enjoy.

Sometimes the useful person isn’t only a victim of this arrangement. Sometimes they built it, brick by brick, with great care and a lot of overtime.

The psychologists Vicki Helgeson and Heidi Fritz have spent years studying something they call unmitigated communion. Ordinary communion is a healthy orientation toward other people: caring, connecting, helping. Unmitigated communion is what happens when that caring isn’t balanced by any comparable care for yourself. You focus on others to the point of neglecting yourself.

People high in unmitigated communion tend to get over-involved in other people’s problems. They struggle to assert their own needs. They hold back what they really think to avoid conflict. Research has linked the trait to more psychological distress. And, awkwardly, researchers have suggested that this kind of helping may be driven less by pure altruism and more by what helping does for the helper, like propping up their self-esteem.

Translated into human language: some of us are useful because being useful feels safer than being liked.

Think about the logic. Being liked is unpredictable. People can like you today and get bored of you next year. You can’t control it, and you can’t earn it with effort. Being needed, on the other hand, feels like a contract. If people need you, they can’t easily leave. If you’re the one who solves everything, you’re irreplaceable. And irreplaceable feels a lot like loved, especially if you grew up in a house where love was conditional, or quiet, or measured in marks.

So you make yourself indispensable. You answer at 1 AM, every time. You never ask for anything back, because asking might reveal that you have needs too, and needs are exactly where rejection gets in. You become fluent in other people’s problems and strangely mute about your own. When someone asks “how are you?” you say “all good” and immediately ask about them, because you’re more comfortable as the helper than the helped.

And then, ten years later, you’re hurt that people only call you when they need something.

But you trained them. Not on purpose, not maliciously, but you did. You told them, through hundreds of tiny decisions, that your opening hours were 24/7. You never once let them see you struggle, so they reasonably assumed you didn’t. You never asked, so they never learned that you might want something. You built a one-way road, put up a sign saying “no entry from this side,” and then blamed the traffic.

I’m not saying this to put the blame on the dependable person. The people who kept taking made their own choices, and plenty of them knew exactly what they were doing. Some takers are genuinely skilled at spotting the person who can’t say no, the way a mosquito finds the one person at the party without Odomos. That’s on them.

I’m saying it because your side of the arrangement is the only part you can actually change.

The Givers Who Win and the Givers Who Burn Out

Here’s the good news, and it comes from one of the more interesting bodies of research on this topic.

The organisational psychologist Adam Grant, in his book Give and Take, sorted people into three styles. Takers try to get more than they give. Matchers try to keep things even, favour for favour. Givers tend to give more than they get.

You’d expect givers to end up at the bottom of the success ladder, and Grant found that many of them do. They get exploited, they burn out, they sacrifice their own work for everyone else’s. But here’s the twist. When he looked at the top of the ladder, he found givers there too.

So what separated the givers at the top from the givers at the bottom? Not how much they cared. Grant distinguished between selfless givers, who give with no regard for their own interests, and otherish givers, who care a great deal about others but also keep an eye on their own wellbeing. Otherish givers still help generously, often without expecting anything back. But they choose when, how and to whom they give. And crucially, they learn to recognise takers and adjust, so their generosity doesn’t keep flowing to the same people who never return it.

Read that again, because it might be the most hopeful idea in this entire piece. The solution to being exploited is not to stop giving. It’s to give with your eyes open. Selfless giving is a leak. Otherish giving is a pipeline with valves.

The water supply, remember, has no valves. It flows to whoever opens the tap. You don’t have to.

How to Spot a Customer Without Becoming a Forensic Auditor

So how do you tell the difference between a friend who sometimes needs your help and someone who has quietly filed you under “Services” in their phone?

Not with one incident. One incident tells you about a day. You’re looking for a pattern, the kind that only becomes visible when you zoom out over months or years. Here’s what tends to show up.

The contact always has a reason. Not usually. Always. Nobody ever calls just to say they saw something that reminded them of you, or to tell you a stupid joke, or to ask how your week was and then actually listen to the answer. If you scroll back, every single conversation has a request hidden inside it, like the toy in a cereal box. Sometimes it’s at the start. Sometimes they make small talk for four minutes first, which is worse, because now you know the small talk was a warm-up act.

A useful exercise: think of the last five times this person contacted you. How many would have happened if they hadn’t needed anything? If the honest answer is zero, that’s information.

Your life only exists where it overlaps with your usefulness. They know exactly where you work, because they’ve asked you for referrals. They know your car’s model, because they’ve borrowed it. They know your salary bracket, because they’ve calculated how much to ask for. But they have no idea your father had surgery last month. They don’t know you’ve been anxious about your job. They couldn’t name your best friend or your favourite food.

Try this: what do they know about you that isn’t on your CV, your bank statement or your contact list? People who care about you accumulate useless information about you. Your childhood fears. Your terrible taste in films. The name of your first pet. Useless information is the fingerprint of genuine interest. Nobody memorises your dog’s name for strategic reasons.

The ledger has only one column. Forget equal. Real friendships are never equal at any given moment. But over months or years, can you remember a single time they offered you something without being asked? Their time, a lift, a phone call when you were obviously having a rough week, a dabba of anything at all? It doesn’t have to match what you gave. It just has to exist.

A related tell: watch what happens when you mention a problem of your own. A friend leans in. Someone who sees you as a service changes the subject within ninety seconds, usually back to their own problem, which is somehow always bigger than yours. You say your mother is unwell. They say their mother is also unwell, and also their landlord is being difficult, and actually, since you mentioned it, do you know a good doctor?

“No” is treated as a breach of contract. This is the clearest signal of all. A friend hears “no” and is disappointed. They might sulk for an hour, the way anyone does. Then they move on, because they understand that you’re a person with your own life, and sometimes people can’t.

Someone who sees you as a service hears “no” and is offended. Not disappointed. Offended. There’s guilt, a sudden chill, a complaint routed through a mutual friend, your mother getting a call, a long voice note about loyalty. Or the classic: “After everything I’ve done for you.” (It’s worth asking, very gently, what that was. There’s often a long pause, followed by a reference to something from 2017.)

The intensity of someone’s reaction to your “no” tells you how much they’d started to think your “yes” belonged to them.

They’re unreachable on your bad days. They needed you through their breakup, their job hunt, their wedding planning, their landlord drama and their dog’s surgery. You needed them once, for one evening, after a terrible day. You got two blue ticks and a reply two days later: “Sorry yaar, crazy week. All good now?”

“All good now?” is a fascinating phrase. It’s a question that hopes the answer is yes, so that nothing further will be required.

Your success makes them strangely quiet. This one’s subtle. When you get a promotion, a new opportunity or some good news, watch who’s genuinely happy. People who value you as a person are thrilled when your life improves. People who value you as a resource sometimes get uneasy, because a busier, more successful you might be less available. Others suddenly get very interested, because a more successful you might be more useful. Neither reaction is about you.

The Caveat, Which Is Not Optional

Now please don’t skip this part, because this is exactly where people go from wise to insufferable.

These are patterns to notice, not a checklist to convict anyone. Everybody fails some of these some of the time. Your best friend may be terrible at calling and brilliant at showing up. Your sister might only phone when she needs something, partly because she knows you’re the one who’ll sort it out and partly because siblings are just like that. Some people are awkward asking how you feel but perfectly comfortable asking for help, because help comes with a clear script and feelings don’t. Many men in particular have never in their lives called a friend just to “talk,” and would genuinely panic if asked to. That doesn’t mean they don’t care. It means they need a reason to call, so they manufacture one, and the reason happens to be a favour.

One bad interaction is data. Ten years of the same interaction is a conclusion.

And before you reach any conclusion, check the context. Are they going through hell right now? Do they have the emotional vocabulary to show up for you, or did they grow up in a house where nobody ever asked anyone how they were? Did you actually tell them you were struggling, or did you expect them to know telepathically, the way you somehow always seem to know about them? Useful people are often terrible at signalling their own needs, and then furious that nobody noticed.

If you finish this section and immediately start running every friend through it like an airport scanner, you’ll find something on everyone. That doesn’t make everyone a smuggler. It just means everyone’s carrying something.

Saying No Without Attaching a Notarised Affidavit

So what do you actually do?

Start with the word itself. The useful person’s biggest problem with saying no isn’t the word. It’s everything they staple to it.

“I’m so sorry, I really wish I could, it’s just that this month has been really tough, my rent went up, and there was that thing with my mother’s tests, and I already lent some money to my cousin, and honestly I feel terrible, I hope you understand, I’ll definitely try next time, please don’t feel bad…”

That’s not a no. That’s an opening statement in court, delivered by a defendant who has already decided he’s guilty.

And every reason you offer is an invitation to cross-examine. “Rent went up? But you got a bonus, no?” “Your cousin? But I asked first.” “Your mother’s tests? But that’s next week, this is only for three days.” Each reason you give becomes a problem they can try to solve, and once they’ve solved it, you’ve run out of excuses and you’re back to yes.

A reason is a lock. Hand someone a lock and they’ll try to pick it.

A clean no sounds almost boring.

“I can’t do it this time.”

“That won’t work for me.”

“I’m not lending money right now.”

“I won’t be able to make it.”

You can say it warmly. You can even say you’re sorry it isn’t a yes, if you genuinely are. You can offer something smaller that you’re actually happy to do: “I can’t drive you to the airport, but I can send you the number of the cab guy I use.” What you don’t owe anybody is a fourteen-point justification for a decision about your own time, money or energy.

Notice, too, how often the useful person says yes instantly, before even checking their calendar or their mood. That speed is the habit to break first. You don’t need to decide in real time. “Let me check and get back to you” is a complete sentence. It gives you an hour to notice whether you actually want to do this, or whether you’re just afraid of the silence that follows a no.

The first few times, saying no will feel like you’ve committed a crime. Your heart will race over a “no” to helping someone shift a sofa. You’ll rehearse the conversation in the shower. You’ll check whether they’ve been online since. That’s not proof you did something wrong. It’s proof of how long you’ve been running a 24-hour helpline with no holidays.

And here’s the strange thing that happens after a few months: most people adjust. Faster than you’d think. The ones who were going to be fine with your boundaries become fine with them. The ones who weren’t, reveal themselves. Either way, you learn something you could never have learned while saying yes.

Stop Rescuing on Reflex

The useful person hears a problem and their hands are already moving. Someone mentions their laptop is slow and you’re already asking for their password. Someone sighs about a form and you’re already filling it. Someone’s in a fight with their landlord and you’re already drafting the message.

Next time, wait.

Ask, “What have you tried so far?” Not as a punishment. As a genuine question. Then actually let them answer.

You’ll be amazed how often a crisis that urgently needed you at 11 PM has somehow solved itself by 11:30, because you didn’t instantly arrive. The cousin who “couldn’t figure out” the online form figures it out. The friend who “had no idea” how to talk to her landlord drafts a perfectly decent message. Some people aren’t helpless. They’ve just never needed to be anything else, because you were always faster.

There’s a version of rescuing that actually harms people, too. When you solve everything for someone, you take away their chance to get better at solving things. Parents know this. If you tie your child’s shoelaces until he’s fourteen, you haven’t been a loving parent. You’ve created a fourteen-year-old who can’t tie his shoelaces. Some of the adults who depend on you are, in a sense, your fourteen-year-olds with untied laces.

One useful shift: from doing to teaching. “I can’t fix it today, but let me show you how so you can do it next time.” Some people will be grateful. Some will be visibly disappointed, because they didn’t want a skill. They wanted a service.

That disappointment is very informative.

“Only Till Salary Comes”: A Short History of Money That Never Came Back

Money deserves its own section, because money is where useful relationships go to die.

Shakespeare got here before your accountant did. In Hamlet, the old courtier Polonius tells his son not to be a borrower or a lender, because a loan often loses both itself and the friend. Polonius was a pompous, interfering old fool who got stabbed through a curtain two acts later, but even pompous old fools are right occasionally.

The modern data isn’t much kinder. In a 2021 survey commissioned by Bankrate, a US personal finance site, 44 percent of Americans who had helped friends or family financially said something bad happened as a result. Thirty-eight percent lost money. Twenty-three percent said the relationship was damaged. And 7 percent said they’d ended up in a physical altercation, which means that, presumably, somewhere in America a loan for a car repair ended with two relatives rolling on the lawn. Among co-signers in the survey, about one in five said they’d lost money, and the same share took a hit to their credit score.

That’s American data, and I won’t pretend it maps neatly onto India. Our version probably has fewer fistfights and more silent treatment at weddings. But the pattern will be familiar to anyone who’s ever lent “just ten thousand, only till salary comes” and then watched three salaries come and go.

Here’s what makes money uniquely toxic to friendship. A loan converts a communal relationship into an exchange relationship overnight. Remember the dabba rule? Money breaks it. Suddenly there’s a number. Suddenly someone owes and someone is owed. Every meeting now has an invisible third person sitting at the table: the outstanding balance. The borrower avoids you because seeing you reminds them. You resent the borrower because you see them posting photos from Goa. Neither of you mentions it. Both of you think about it constantly.

The lender, meanwhile, faces an impossible choice. Ask for the money back, and you become the petty, money-minded friend who “is still on about that.” Don’t ask, and you become a doormat who’s quietly furious every time the borrower orders a second cocktail. There is no comfortable position. The loan has already damaged the friendship. You’re just choosing which kind of damage.

So a few rules, born out of other people’s suffering.

Only lend what you could quietly give up. Before you transfer anything, imagine never seeing it again. Not “it’ll probably come back.” Never. If the thought of losing that amount would make you resent the person, don’t lend it. Lend a smaller amount you could truly let go of, or don’t lend at all.

Ask yourself the real question. “If this money never comes back, do I still want this person in my life?” If the honest answer is no, the loan will probably end the friendship anyway. You might as well keep the money and lose the friendship cheaply.

Treat repeated loans as a pattern, not a series of emergencies. One loan during a genuine crisis is friendship. The same person borrowing for the fourth time, with the first three still unpaid, is a business model, and you’re the bank that doesn’t charge interest. It’s entirely reasonable to say, “Let’s close the first one before we talk about a second.” That isn’t cruelty. It’s arithmetic. A person who genuinely respects you will find that fair. A person who has been using you will find it outrageous.

Be extremely careful about guaranteeing anything. Signing as a guarantor or co-signer for someone’s loan is not a favour. It’s taking on their debt with none of the control. If they miss payments, it’s your credit score and potentially your money on the line. In many Indian families, being asked to “just sign here as guarantor, it’s a formality” is treated as a minor request. It is not a formality. It is the opposite of a formality. If you wouldn’t lend them that full amount in cash today, don’t guarantee it.

Sometimes the kindest option is a gift. If someone you love is genuinely struggling and you can afford it, giving them a smaller amount outright, with no expectation of repayment, often protects the relationship far better than lending them a larger amount you’ll be thinking about for three years. A gift keeps the dabba communal. A loan turns it into an invoice.

And if you’ve already been burned, let it be a lesson, not a grudge. You can decide not to lend that person money again without deciding they’re a terrible human being. Some people are just bad with money. They’re not villains. They’re simply not people you should be a bank for.

Please Don’t Run Loyalty Tests. You’ll Fail Them Too.

This is where people who’ve just discovered they’re being used briefly become villains themselves.

They pretend they’ve lost their job to see who sticks around. They fake an emergency to see who comes running. They post a vague sad status (“Some people show their true colours when you need them most”) and then count who messages. They go silent for three weeks to “see who notices.” Some even announce they’re “taking a break from everyone” so they can monitor who tries to reach them.

Don’t.

First, it’s manipulative. You’d be furious if somebody did it to you. If a friend told you they’d lost their job, you rearranged your week to support them, and then you found out it was an experiment, would you ever trust them again?

Second, the results are garbage. People respond to a fake crisis based on their real lives, which you can’t see. A friend whose own father is in the ICU won’t turn up for your invented emergency, and that tells you nothing about how much he loves you. A friend who’s quietly dealing with depression won’t notice your three-week silence, because she’s barely noticing her own life. Your test can’t control for any of this. It’s like judging a restaurant by visiting it during a power cut.

Third, you turn into the person who manufactures drama to measure love, and nobody enjoys being friends with a lie detector. Relationships survive a lot of things. They don’t survive constant surveillance.

And fourth, honestly, most of us would fail a loyalty test if one were run on us. Think of the last time a friend was having a hard month. Did you check in every week? Or did you send one “hope you’re okay” message and get back to your own chaos? If you’d fail your own test, it isn’t a fair test. It’s a trap.

You don’t need to engineer a test. Life will run plenty of real ones for free, and it’s a much better scientist than you. All you have to do is stop being available at superhuman levels and come down to ordinary human ones.

Reply tomorrow instead of instantly. Say no when you mean no. Stop volunteering before you’re asked. Stop being the one who always organises. Not as a strategy, but simply because that’s how a normal person with their own life behaves.

Then watch who stays the same. That’s not a test. That’s just being a person and paying attention.

The Most Underrated Move: Ask for Something

Here’s the one almost nobody tries.

A lot of useful people never ask for anything, partly out of pride and partly because asking feels dangerous. Then they complain that nobody ever offers. But some people genuinely don’t offer because it has never occurred to them that you might need anything. You’ve presented yourself as a fully self-sufficient machine for a decade. Why would they think the machine needs servicing?

There’s an old observation attributed to Benjamin Franklin, from his autobiography. Franklin had a rival in the Pennsylvania legislature who didn’t like him. Instead of trying to win him over by doing him a favour, Franklin asked to borrow a rare book from the man’s library. The rival lent it, Franklin returned it with a warm note of thanks, and, according to Franklin, the man was friendly to him from then on. Franklin’s conclusion was that someone who has done you a kindness is more ready to do you another than someone you’ve done a kindness for.

In 1969, the psychologists Jon Jecker and David Landy tested a version of this. Participants won some money in an experiment. Afterwards, some were approached by the researcher, who asked them, as a personal favour, to return the money because he was using his own funds. Those who were asked for that personal favour ended up liking the researcher more than those who weren’t asked. This has come to be called the Ben Franklin effect: doing someone a favour can increase how much you like them.

Think about what that means for the useful person. By never asking for anything, you may have been denying people the very experience that builds attachment to you. Every relationship where you only give is a relationship where the other person never gets to invest in you. And people value what they invest in.

So ask. Small things first. Ask a friend to come with you to a hospital appointment. Ask for help moving a cupboard. Ask someone to look over your CV, or recommend a book, or just listen while you complain about your week for twenty minutes without trying to fix anything.

Not as a test. As participation. You’re letting the dabba travel the other way for once.

Some people will show up and surprise you. Some will be genuinely touched that you asked, because they’d always felt slightly useless around you, the way you feel useless around a friend who never lets you pay the bill. A few will vanish, or suddenly be busy, or say yes and then never follow through.

All of those outcomes are information you could never have collected while you were busy being unlimited.

Downgrade, Don’t Delete

Once you’ve spotted the pattern, the internet will offer you exactly one solution. Cut them off. Block, delete, move on, and post a quote over a sunset about protecting your peace and outgrowing people who don’t vibe with your frequency.

Sometimes that’s genuinely right. If someone is guilting you, threatening you, manipulating you, or draining you financially with no intention of ever stopping, distance isn’t drama. It’s maintenance. You don’t owe anyone permanent access to you just because you once knew them in school.

But most transactional relationships don’t need an execution. They need a reclassification.

Here’s the thing nobody says out loud: not everyone has to be a friend. We use the word so loosely that it’s lost all meaning. In one sentence, “friend” can mean the person who’d donate a kidney to you and the person whose cousin’s wedding you once attended by accident.

Some people are colleagues you like. Some are neighbours you’d help in an emergency. Some are cousins you see at weddings and genuinely enjoy for exactly three hours. Some are gym friends, office lunch friends, Sunday cricket friends, school WhatsApp group friends who only resurface for reunions and political arguments.

Those situational friendships are perfectly fine. They’re real, they’re pleasant, and they’ll probably fade when the situation does. That isn’t betrayal. That’s the terms and conditions. The only reason it hurt was that you mistook a lease for a purchase.

The problem was never that a relationship was transactional. The problem was believing it was something else, and paying a best friend’s price for an acquaintance’s relationship.

So downgrade. Keep the person; change the access.

The colleague who only calls for referrals can still be someone you have a pleasant chai with. He just doesn’t get your personal contacts anymore. The cousin who only calls for money can still be someone you laugh with at Diwali. He just doesn’t get money. The friend who only calls to vent can still be someone you care about. She just gets twenty minutes instead of two hours, and you’re allowed to say, “Yaar, I can’t take on much tonight, I’m exhausted.”

They can stay in your life. They just don’t get your 1 AM, your savings, your car keys and your Sundays anymore. Those are reserved for the people who’d notice if you stopped being useful and keep calling anyway.

The Cynic Is Just a Used Person Charging Admission

There’s a trap on the other side of all this, and it’s a nasty one, because it looks like wisdom.

Some people discover they’ve been used and the lesson they take away is: everybody wants something. From then on, every new friendship gets interrogated. The new colleague who invites them to lunch must have an angle. The neighbour who brings over sweets must need a favour. The person who compliments their shirt must be setting up a request. Even kindness gets checked for hidden charges, like a restaurant bill examined under a lamp.

Congratulations. You’re safe now.

You’re also exhausting, lonely, and quite possibly the reason decent people stop bothering with you. Because genuine people, the third-group people, the ones who’d keep calling after the water stopped, have no interest in passing an entrance exam to be your friend. They’ll just quietly go and be friends with someone less suspicious.

Cynicism feels like intelligence. It’s actually the same wound wearing sunglasses.

The exploited person gave everyone unlimited access. The cynic gives everyone none. They look like opposites, but underneath they have exactly the same problem: they can’t tell people apart, so they treat everyone identically. One trusts blindly, the other distrusts blindly. Both have stopped actually looking at the person in front of them.

The fix isn’t to stop trusting. It’s to trust in instalments. A little, then more, as people show you who they are over time. The way you’d treat a new restaurant before booking it for your parents’ anniversary. You don’t refuse to ever eat out because one place gave you food poisoning. You just stop going back to that place, and you try the next one with a smaller order first.

And remember Grant’s otherish givers: the ones who succeed don’t stop giving. They give generously to people who show they’re givers or matchers, and they get more careful with people who show they’re takers. That’s not cynicism. That’s just having working eyesight.

Don’t Become Useless. Become Discerning.

One last thing, for the reliable ones who’ve been quietly feeling attacked for the past several thousand words.

If people keep coming to you, it probably means you’re genuinely good at things. You’re dependable. You’re capable. You’re generous. You know people. You stay calm when others panic. In a crisis, you’re the one everyone trusts. Those aren’t flaws. They’re some of the best qualities a human being can have, and the world needs far more people like you than it needs another person who proudly announces that he “doesn’t do favours for anyone, bro, self-respect.”

So please don’t respond to all this by hating your own usefulness. Don’t turn deliberately unhelpful to “teach everyone a lesson.” Don’t become the person who was burned once and now refuses to lend anyone a pen. That’s not growth. That’s just a different kind of injury.

The answer isn’t to become useless. It’s to stop being unlimited.

The difference between a utility and a person isn’t that one is helpful and the other isn’t. Both can be extraordinarily helpful. The difference is that a utility doesn’t get to choose who it serves. The water supply can’t decide that this flat deserves water and that one has been rude for six years. It can’t take a Sunday off. It can’t say, “I’ll help you, but not at 2 AM, and not for the fourth time this month.” It just flows to whoever opens the tap.

You can choose. That’s the whole difference. That’s the only difference.

You can be generous without being available to everyone. You can be helpful without becoming somebody’s unpaid personal assistant. You can be kind without being an easy target. Your time, money, effort and attention are not a municipal resource. Give them freely if you like. Give them abundantly to people who’ve earned them. Just give them on purpose.

Now Scroll Your Own WhatsApp

Before you close this tab and start auditing everyone you’ve ever met, do one small thing.

Open WhatsApp and look at the last ten conversations you started. Not the ones where someone messaged you. The ones where you went first.

How many of them began with a “Hi” that had something buffering behind it?

Be honest. Count them. The airline cousin. The doctor friend. The guy who knows a guy. That colleague you messaged “long time!” right before asking for a referral.

There’s nothing shameful in that. Needs are human, and a big part of friendship is people being useful to each other on purpose. But somewhere right now, someone is watching your name pop up on their screen and already bracing for the request. To them, you’re the society WhatsApp group on a no-water day. You’re their “Hi, free?”

And the reason they’ve never complained to you about it is the same reason you never complained to your takers. They’re too polite. They like being needed. They’d rather help than risk the silence.

So this week, message one person who has absolutely nothing you need. No favour, no referral, no form to fill, no “quick question.” Just “Saw this and thought of you.” Or “How’s your mother’s knee now?” Or the rarest message in the entire Indian phone: “Kya chal raha hai?” with nothing hidden behind it.

Then wait.

And if they reply, slightly suspicious, “All good! Why, kya hua? Need something?”

Laugh. Then notice how long it’s been since anyone, including you, called the water supply just to ask how it’s doing.

References & Research Sources

Classic texts

• Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII (friendships of utility, pleasure and character).
• Shakespeare, W. Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3 (Polonius’s advice to Laertes on borrowing and lending).
• Franklin, B. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (the borrowed-book episode).

Research

• Clark, M. S., & Mills, J. (1979). Interpersonal attraction in exchange and communal relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(1), 12-24. Link
• Clark Relationship Lab, Yale University. Overview of communal and exchange norms research. Link
• Ross, M., & Sicoly, F. (1979). Egocentric biases in availability and attribution. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(3), 322-336.
• Roberts, S. G. B., & Dunbar, R. I. M. (2015). Managing relationship decay: Network, gender, and contextual effects. Human Nature, 26(4), 426-450. Link
• Koval, C. Z., vanDellen, M. R., Fitzsimons, G. M., & Ranby, K. W. (2015). The burden of responsibility: Interpersonal costs of high self-control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108(5), 750-766. Link · Duke Fuqua summary
• Fritz, H. L., & Helgeson, V. S. (1998). Distinctions of unmitigated communion from communion: Self-neglect and overinvolvement with others. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 121-140. Link
• Helgeson, V. S., & Fritz, H. L. (1998). A theory of unmitigated communion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2, 173-183.
• Helgeson, V. S., et al. Partner unmitigated communion moderates communal coping benefits in type 2 diabetes. Journal of Health Psychology (introduction reviews unmitigated communion findings). Link
• Grant, A. (2013). Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success. Viking. Author interview
• Jecker, J., & Landy, D. (1969). Liking a person as a function of doing him a favour. Human Relations, 22, 371-378.

Surveys

• Bankrate. Lending money to friends and family survey (conducted by YouGov), December 2021. Report · Press release (PDF)

From this site

• My Phone Stopped Ringing When I Lost My Job. Were They Ever Calling Me?

---