On Discovering You've Already Been Paid for Everything You've Done (Becoming Someone's Wallpaper)

I was sitting at a restaurant last Tuesday when I saw Marcus across the room. Marcus, who I'd mentored through his first two years at my former company. Marcus, to whom I'd given detailed feedback on probably forty presentations, stayed late helping debug his code on at least a dozen occasions, and generally functioned as his unofficial career sherpa. He was at a table near the window with two other people, laughing at something, his hand gesturing the way he always did when he was telling a story he thought was funny. I had a fork halfway to my mouth. I set it down. Caught his eye across the dining room, smiled, raised my hand in a small wave. He looked directly at me, and I watched his face do this thing: this flicker of recognition followed immediately by a kind of calculated blankness, before he turned back to his companions and continued his story as if he'd seen nothing at all. I picked up my fork again. The pasta had gone cold.

The thing about being ignored by someone you've invested in is not the emotional sting (though yes, there's that). It's more the sudden, vertiginous realization that somewhere along the line, without anyone announcing it, you became optional. Irrelevant, even.

There's this concept in psychology called social exchange theory that basically applies economic principles to human relationships.1 The fundamental premise is that people engage in a kind of cost-benefit analysis when deciding whether to maintain relationships: they're weighing what they get against what they give. George C. Homans, who developed this framework in the 1950s, wasn't trying to be cynical; he was just observing what actually happens when you strip away the romantic narratives we tell ourselves about human connection.

Here's what I've noticed, though: the exchange isn't ongoing. You don't accumulate credit. There's no relationship bank account where your past deposits earn interest over time.

Think about your job. Let's say you've been with your company for seven years. You've worked late, taken on projects nobody wanted, mentored junior colleagues, basically been the person everyone could count on. Then your company restructures, or your role becomes redundant, or you just stop being useful in the particular way they need. The relationship changes immediately.2 Not over time, not gradually. Immediately.

Your boss, who used to respond to your emails within minutes, now takes days. Colleagues who sought your input suddenly have other people to consult. You're still technically employed, still showing up, but the texture of everything has shifted. And the shift isn't about whether people like you or not. It's about whether you can still provide or withhold something they want.

This is what I've been calling the Rule of Relevance: As soon as you're no longer in a position to benefit or harm someone, you become what gamers call an NPC (a non-player character) in their life.3 Your thoughts, feelings, and goals stop mattering in their decision-making calculus. Not because they're bad people (though some might be), but because this is how power dynamics actually function.

Power, in this framework, isn't about authority or position. It's simpler and more fundamental: the ability to either give people what they want or withhold what they want.10 That's it. When you have something someone needs (expertise, access, approval, affection, money, opportunity), you have power in that relationship. When you don't, you don't.

Most of us operate under this implicit belief that past actions create ongoing obligations.11 We think: "After everything I've done for you..." and we genuinely expect that "everything" to matter. To count toward something. To have weight in current and future interactions.

This belief shows up everywhere. In friendships: "I was there for you during your divorce." In families: "I paid for your college." At work: "I gave you your first break in this industry." The underlying assumption is always the same: I did X in the past, therefore you owe me Y now.

Except for one thing. The game doesn't run on gratitude. And the reason it doesn't (the reason that's going to sound harsh but I think is actually accurate) is you've already been paid.

When I helped Marcus with those presentations, I wasn't doing it for free. I was getting something: maybe I felt good about myself, maybe I was building my reputation as a mentor, maybe I just enjoyed feeling needed. Whatever the specific currency, there was an exchange happening in real time. I gave feedback; I received the satisfaction of giving feedback (and maybe the social capital of being seen as generous with my time, and maybe the internal narrative of being a Good Person Who Helps Others).

The transaction was complete when it happened. The accounts balanced right then. There's no outstanding debt in the cosmic ledger, regardless of how much you'd like there to be one.

When you examine your own "After everything I've done..." moments (and I've been examining mine), what you often find is you agreed to something you didn't actually want to do, but you did it anyway because you were hoping it would lead to some future benefit. Maybe continued loyalty. Maybe reciprocal help when you needed it. Maybe just ongoing relevance in that person's life.4

But these hopes existed primarily in your head. Unless you explicitly negotiated those terms (and who does that?), you were operating on an assumption about how relationships work that the other person may not have shared.

The reciprocity norm (this social expectation that people should return favors) is real and powerful in some contexts. You hold a door open; someone says thank you. You give someone a ride; they offer you gas money or at least express appreciation. Short-term, immediate exchanges tend to play out according to this norm.

But long-term, diffuse obligations? Those are much shakier. The farther in the past your help occurred, the less psychological weight it carries for the recipient. Time erodes debt, at least in the subjective experience of the person who received the help.

My friend Sarah had this whole thing with her college roommate. They'd been incredibly close: that intense, formative friendship you have in your early twenties where you're basically building your adult identity together. Sarah was there through her friend's terrible relationship, through her career crisis, through her father's death.

Then Sarah's life hit a rough patch (job loss, breakup, the usual cascade), and she reached out expecting... something. Support, at minimum. What she got was polite but distant. Three-day delays on texts. "So sorry you're going through this" followed by nothing actionable. Her friend was busy, had her own thing going on, couldn't really be available in the way Sarah needed. Sarah showed me the message thread once: a slowly widening gap between blue and gray bubbles, timestamps stretching from minutes to hours to days to weeks.

"After everything I was there for," Sarah kept saying. "After all of that."

Her friend wasn't wrong, exactly. She hadn't promised eternal devotion. They'd been close during a period when their needs aligned, when the friendship was mutually beneficial in ways that probably neither of them can possibly articulate. Then circumstances changed. Sarah's friend had moved on (new job, new relationship, new city, new friend group), and the cost-benefit analysis of maintaining that level of closeness shifted.

Loyalty is extraordinarily rare.12 Not the word "loyalty," which everyone claims to value. Actual loyalty, the kind that endures beyond the point where it's convenient or beneficial.

The vast majority of relationships (professional, social, even some familial ones) are governed not by loyalty or fairness or gratitude or any of the virtues we like to think hold society together, but by power. By the ongoing exchange of benefits.

And here's what I realized last week, and it's been sitting uncomfortably in my chest ever since: there's an email in my inbox from David.13 David, who used to work at the same company I'm at now, back before he got laid off in the restructuring. David, who I used to have coffee with every Thursday. David, who's been out of work for seven months and has been sending periodic updates about his job search, asking if I know of any openings, if I could make an introduction.

The email arrived six days ago. "Hey, just following up on..." I've opened it three times. I know what it's asking. I could help: I do know someone at a company that's hiring. It would take maybe twenty minutes to write an intro email. But every time I start to reply, I find myself doing something else instead. Checking Slack. Refilling my coffee. Suddenly remembering I need to review that document someone sent.

I haven't responded. And if I'm honest about why, it's not because I'm busy (though I am). It's because David can't help me anymore. He's not connected to anything I need access to. Our coffee conversations used to include useful information about internal politics, about who was working on what. Now they'd just be... him asking for help. Which makes me, what? Tired? Resistant? Aware that the exchange has become unbalanced in a way that feels costly?

I am doing to David exactly what Marcus did to me. The recognition of this does not make me feel enlightened. It makes me feel like I've been caught.

The "you've already been paid" framework I've been building this whole essay: it explains Marcus perfectly. It explains Sarah's friend. It even explains my own behavior with David, this quiet calculation about whether responding is worth the effort. But something about that framework feels incomplete now, uncomfortably tidy.5

Because if I really examine it, there are forms of care that didn't pay out in warm feelings or reputation points. My aunt taking care of her husband through dementia. That wasn't rewarded. It was grueling, thankless, completely invisible to everyone outside the immediate family. No status accrued. No good feelings during. Just duty, or something deeper than duty. Something the exchange metaphor can't quite capture.

Or my friend who spent a year helping her ex-husband after their divorce because he was suicidal and she couldn't just let him collapse even though he'd been terrible to her. That wasn't transactional. That was, what? Attachment that outlasts utility? Care that exists outside the ledger? She got nothing from it except sleep deprivation and the knowledge that she'd done what she felt she had to do, even though it made no sense in cost-benefit terms.

Anthropologists have this concept of gift economies: systems where people give without immediate expectation of return, where the exchange itself creates social bonds rather than settling debts. Marcel Mauss wrote about this in the 1920s, arguing that gifts create obligations precisely because they're not market transactions. The gift lives in a different register than payment.

Some relationships operate more like gifts than trades. The care doesn't generate immediate rewards; it generates bonds. Bonds that might not be reciprocated, might not be "fair," might leave you feeling like you gave more than you got. But the giving wasn't neutral. It changed something between you.

So maybe the truth is bifurcated. Most professional relationships, many friendships, some family connections: those run on the power-utility logic I've been describing. The exchange framework works there. But there's another category of relationship where the exchange metaphor just breaks, where people keep showing up past the point of rational benefit, driven by something that looks less like calculation and more like attachment.6 Care that's already woven in.

Which doesn't let me off the hook with David. That email still sits unanswered. And I notice how my attention shifts depending on who has power over me or access I need. Last month, someone I barely know got promoted to VP at a company I had wanted to work with. Suddenly I found myself liking her LinkedIn posts, commenting thoughtfully, finding reasons to reconnect. My interest in her as a human being mysteriously intensified right around the time she could help my career.7

I do this. We all do this. And we mostly don't admit it, even to ourselves, because admitting it means acknowledging we're running the same power calculus we resent in others. I want Marcus to value our relationship independent of utility, but do I value David independent of utility? The evidence suggests I don't.

Still, understanding the mechanics helps. There's research on power in romantic relationships showing that people who have a strong sense of power in their relationships tend to report higher satisfaction. Not balanced power, necessarily. Just the subjective sense that you have power. Feeling powerful means feeling secure, knowing you could walk away if you needed to, not being desperate for the other person to stay because you have other options.

The people with less power (those who need the relationship more, who have fewer alternatives, who would lose more if it ended) tend to be less satisfied and more anxious. They're more likely to monitor the relationship for signs of trouble, more likely to make concessions they don't want to make, more likely to tolerate behavior they wouldn't otherwise accept.

Applying this outside of romance: when you can no longer help or hurt someone, your power in that relationship drops to zero. At which point, their behavior toward you changes to reflect that new reality.

I saw Marcus again yesterday, actually. Different restaurant, different part of town. This time he didn't even pretend not to see me. He just genuinely didn't notice me. Walked right past my table on his way to the restroom, his attention absorbed in his phone, thumbs moving across the screen. I had my water glass halfway to my mouth and set it down quietly, as if making noise might force him to register my presence. He walked back to his table without looking up once.

And the weird thing is, I don't think he's a terrible person. I think he's operating according to the same principles we all operate according to, whether we admit it or not. I'm not his mentor anymore. I'm not at his company anymore. I'm not in a position to help his career. I don't have access to opportunities or resources he needs. The utility I once provided has ended. The transaction, as mercenary as that sounds, is complete.

What I've been trying to figure out is whether understanding this makes things better or worse. On one hand, worse: it's clarifying in an uncomfortable way. All those relationships you thought were based on genuine connection and mutual regard? Some of them might actually be based on contingent utility, on what economists would call mutual benefit within a transaction framework.8

On the other hand, maybe better: when you stop expecting people to behave as though your past actions create ongoing debts, you stop being disappointed by perfectly predictable behavior. You stop saying "After everything I did..." and start asking "What value am I providing now?" or "What power do I currently have in this dynamic?" Those are less romantic questions, but they're more useful.9

And maybe (I'm still working this out) understanding the actual mechanics of relevance allows you to make more intentional choices about which relationships you invest in and why. If you're only relevant to someone because of what you can provide, you can decide whether that's a relationship you want to maintain. If you're only maintaining a relationship because you keep hoping they'll eventually reciprocate all the help you gave them three years ago, you can stop waiting for something that isn't coming and redirect that energy elsewhere.

There's something almost freeing about facing the transactional reality underneath relationships. Not cynical, exactly. Just realistic. You get to stop performing under the misapprehension that you're building some permanent edifice of goodwill. You get to recognize what's actually happening: a series of discrete exchanges, each complete in itself, with no necessary connection to future behavior.

Whether Marcus ever acknowledges me in public again will depend entirely on whether I regain the ability to help or hurt him in some meaningful way. If I get a position where I have influence over his career trajectory, his recognition of my existence will mysteriously return. If I don't, it won't. This isn't personal. It's just mechanics.

I'm sitting here now, waiting for my check, looking around at the other diners and thinking about how many relationships in my life are predicated on ongoing utility versus genuine connection. It's fewer genuine connections than I'd like to believe, probably. But at least I'm not confused about it anymore. At least I know what I'm looking at when someone's face flickers that particular way and then goes carefully blank.

You become wallpaper the moment you can no longer affect the picture. And wallpaper is something we all become to someone.