Give to the one who won't say thanks

You already know who it is. The coworker who borrows your time and forgets your name when credit gets handed out. The customer who never once said thanks. The manager who absorbs your good ideas and presents them upstairs as his own. You've helped that person before, watched it vanish into a hole, and felt the small flat anger of it. Now they need something again.

Seneca, who knew exactly how often a gift comes back empty, refused to make that the deciding factor: "we must sometimes do what we have little hope will turn out well, and bestow benefits upon those who we not only think will prove ungrateful, but who we know have been so" (Of Benefits I.X, Stewart). Not from softness. From clarity about what the good act actually is.

Here's the move the whole week turns on. The value of helping someone is in the helping. You did a right thing; that part is finished and can't be taken back, whatever they do or don't say. Their gratitude was never the point, and treating it as the point hands them a vote they shouldn't get.

You can give with eyes open. Know they'll likely take and stay quiet, and do it anyway, because the act is yours.