One of my favorite quotes, actually. I find a lot of comfort in this one.
Probably in part because it reminds me of my family’s endless repetition of the moral code: “It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do something.”
But I think it is also antidote to the unintentional poison in my family’s moral code. As much as I love and quote, “It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do something,” it forgets that first comfort, doing is not the same as finishing. Helping is not the same as fixing. And it is so profoundly easy to slip into guilt and self-vilification for the work that has not been done.
This is also why I believe so strongly in “paying it forward.” I can only do so much for so many people. But I don’t want the help back. If I can give the help, then it is not what I actually need. There I am wealthy (I also love the idea of wealth being what you can give instead of what you have and hoard). Part of what I need is the fixing helping of that problem: that what I do is my (at least current) limit. Asking those I give to, to pay it forward if and/or when they can, allows me to break just a little of my own limitations.
Forward of those I help are people I don’t know and could never have helped. But not asking for the help back means they can get it and, hopefully, can move on to help others themselves. Reaching people I would never have thought to help. That’s the deep benefit of the act. It helps much fewer people directly but it lets it go in directions that I wouldn’t choose. And that’s necessary, to not let any small group dictate what is worthy of help and what is not. We don’t deserve that power. We don’t deserve that control. Because that’s just hoarding by a different name.
When someone has a sense of superiority, they treat people as simultaneously competent and incompetent depending on what’s convenient at the time. You’ll notice this in many ways.
Women are perceived as maturing faster in order to expect more of them or downplay abuse against them. But no one suggests trusting young girls’ intuition more because of it.
Black children are perceived as grown when it’s an excuse to kill them for being scary or sentence them as adults for crimes. But no one suggests that those adultified black children be allowed to vote.
Disabled people are seen as incompetent enough to be bullied but also competent enough to deny them support.
Authoritarian parents use their children’s perceived incompetence as justification for the authority, but also see them as competent when expecting good grades, expecting an unfair share of household duties, or expecting them to parent their younger siblings.
Legal age restrictions often treat someone as underage when they want to decide what to put in their own bodies but adults when sentencing them for crimes, when making them fight wars, or when defending old perverts who want to have sex with them.
This is a very accurate way to determine whether someone has a sense of superiority over you. If they treat you consistently when deciding how competent you are, even if they sometimes decide inaccurately, then they see you as human and are likely doing the best they can. But if they flip-flop whether they see you as competent, then they have a sense of superiority and see you as beneath them.
I feel like this is an excellent way to play with the old Grimtooth dungeon ideas. Where there's no obvious treasure hoard but there's a lot of very valuable stuff if the PCs think about it.
All those traps and mimics require stuff to support them. You just have to excavate and steal all that, so you can fence it for a tidy profit on top of all the XP you just earned.
