Giving turns out to be getting

Run the week back. The credit you let pass unclaimed. The praise you gave with no ledger open. The grudging "good job" you replaced with the real one. The third thing you stopped reaching for. The night you thanked someone at home for work nobody ever sees. It can feel, doing all that, like you're handing pieces of yourself away — like recognition is a fixed pile and every bit you give is a bit you lose.

Marcus saw the opposite, and put it as plainly as he put anything. "No man is tired of receiving what is useful. But it is useful to act according to nature. Do not then be tired of receiving what is useful by doing it to others" (Meditations 7.74, Long). Read it twice. Doing good to others is itself receiving what is useful. The giving and the getting are the same motion. You weren't depleting a pile. You were being fed by the act of feeding others.

That's why none of it left you poorer. The driver, the cashier, the parent on the late feed — each one gets more whole, not less, by crediting the people around them.

Next week turns to the work done unseen: being just when no one is watching, and no credit is even possible.