There is a tax we sometimes pay without ever realizing we’ve been charged.
I like to call it the asshole tax.
I recently had an interaction with someone who was clearly an expert at racking up this particular surcharge, and it didn’t take long for me to understand how he’d earned this expertise. When I say surcharge, I’m not necessarily implying money. In fact, most of the time I don’t think it does. You pay it when someone who normally answers right away takes their time answering you. You pay it when someone could probably squeeze you in at the last minute but isn’t particularly motivated to try. You pay it when a person stops giving you the benefit of the doubt, stops making exceptions for you, or stops trusting that you’ll do what you said you would do.
Nobody tells you you’ve been charged. The service may cost exactly the same. The experience won’t be. Because there is an invisible ledger running alongside our interactions with other people.
Be kind. Be reasonable. Respect someone’s time. Keep your word. Treat people like human beings rather than obstacles standing between you and something you want, and something interesting happens. People want to be around you. They answer your message a little faster. They stay an extra few minutes. They tell you about something you didn’t know was available. Sometimes they simply do a little more than they had to because they genuinely don’t mind doing it for you.
None of those things were owed to you. Become difficult enough and people begin withdrawing it without you even noticing. They become less flexible. Less trusting. Less interested in finding a way to make something work. Eventually, you may still get exactly what you paid for.
But that’s all you’ll get.
That’s the funny thing about people who are constantly trying to make sure they get the better end of every interaction. They’re often paying attention to the thing directly in front of them and completely missing everything happening around it. That can leave you surrounded by increasingly difficult people, and then something predictable happens. You start expecting everyone to be difficult, so you become a little more demanding, suspicious, impatient, and unpleasant yourself. That drives away a few more good people. Eventually, everywhere you look, you see assholes.
At some point, it might be worth considering the one person who keeps showing up in every one of those interactions. Maybe the asshole tax isn’t something other people charge us at all. Maybe it’s the price we pay for becoming someone good people no longer want to deal with.
That’s the asshole tax.
Charlotte