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I was helping a hard working kid with some financial education and told him essentially the same thing. He simply needed to make more money. He was making $13 /

I was helping a hard working kid with some financial education and told him essentially the same thing. He simply needed to make more money. He was making $13 / hour at the time and I helped him line up an interview with a guy who was ready to hire him doing the same thing for $25 / hour + professional training. He ghosted me and the interviewer. I’d been working with him for MONTHS to help get his life straightened out. I still have no idea why he did it.

monkeydreams 5y ago
I've been that guy. There are any numbers of reasons for this. Shame, low confidence in meeting yours (and everyone else's) expectations, inability to imagine a better future (which leads to unimaginable cognitive load as you act in ways your brain finds torturous without any sense that it will ever improve), etc, etc. Typical people are all, pretty much, the same. Non-typical folk are different in their own ways. There is no single path to getting someone back up on their feet. This is one reason why anti-poverty campaigns - particularly the "mutual obligation" style of welfare - fail.
- brightball 5y ago
  That makes some sense to me.
djokkataja 5y ago
Is it possible it was a cultural thing? This is reading a ton into small details and generalizing a lot but... You mentioned you were helping him "get his life straightened out"; maybe he felt like it was going to pull him away from the friends that he'd grown up with? Kind of a difference of subcultures: one subculture that's poor and that values loyalty to friends over most other things (money comes and goes) vs a subculture that values career and money over most other things. (Not that these values are necessarily always mutually exclusive... but sometimes it can be uncomfortable to straddle the gap.) The other thing that makes me wonder if it's a cultural gap is that you mentioned he was going to be able to make twice as much as he was making before for doing the same thing. If it's the same work as before, what's the difference if not cultural? Learning to talk a certain way about the things you do, use more professional language, present yourself a certain way, and ditch the people you work with if you can earn more money doing the same thing. Then he's eroding his value for loyalty by learning to bullshit the people he work with on a regular basis, because he's acting in a way that's not how he normally acts, and he's established a precedent that he's willing to ditch his new coworkers for an entirely different batch if he can make more money by doing so. He might look at that and look at the friends and/or community he already has and decide he doesn't like where that path might lead him. That could also explain why he ghosted you. He might feel ashamed because he feels that he owes you for genuinely trying to help him. But how can he repay you except by accepting your help? And explaining where he's coming from would only lead to an ugly conflict or you convincing him that he's irrational and should just take the job -- but he's already decided he doesn't want to go that route. If he cuts all conflict, nukes it from orbit, then he can get on with his life however he wants to.
- brightball 5y ago
  Without too much detail, he came from a really bad home environment. Ran away from home at 16 and was 22 when I was helping him out. The only thing that made any sense to me was some type of loyalty to the place he was working (commercial HVAC company) but it always seemed like this place treated him badly. He’d been there for almost 3 years though with the prospect of a raise dangled in front of him like a carrot and never materializing.
  - buescher 5y ago
    If his current employer was a mom and pop, he may have owed the owner money on screwball terms, from deductions from his paycheck (unless he left) to "you don't have to pay this back unless you leave".
    - brightball 5y ago
      From my reviews of his finances, nothing like that ever came up.
      - buescher 5y ago
        I knew someone like that, and I always suspected he owed his boss money. Turned down a job with better benefits with a large, much more secure company to take a counteroffer from the entrepreneur who was going broke. He also had this weird bond with the employer that mistreated him and kept dangling a raise (real soon now) in front of him.
emj 5y ago
All we can do is try hard not hurt people with our version of good will. I've done the same with the same outcome, one of those people went on and made an impact and is cited frequently here, but not because of any help from me.
- clove 5y ago
  You gotta give everyone a chance if you can. I don't see why anyone should feel bad for giving someone an opportunity that is later thrown away. You did the right thing by giving someone that opportunity; whether he takes it or not is up to him. If everyone in the world thought like you, the world would be a better place. Unfortunately, this world is full of nepotism and tribalism. But people like you (and the parent commenter) help balance it out.

monkeydreams 5y ago

I've been that guy. There are any numbers of reasons for this. Shame, low confidence in meeting yours (and everyone else's) expectations, inability to imagine a better future (which leads to unimaginable cognitive load as you act in ways your brain finds torturous without any sense that it will ever improve), etc, etc. Typical people are all, pretty much, the same. Non-typical folk are different in their own ways. There is no single path to getting someone back up on their feet. This is one reason why anti-poverty campaigns - particularly the "mutual obligation" style of welfare - fail.

brightball 5y ago
That makes some sense to me.

djokkataja 5y ago

Is it possible it was a cultural thing? This is reading a ton into small details and generalizing a lot but... You mentioned you were helping him "get his life straightened out"; maybe he felt like it was going to pull him away from the friends that he'd grown up with? Kind of a difference of subcultures: one subculture that's poor and that values loyalty to friends over most other things (money comes and goes) vs a subculture that values career and money over most other things. (Not that these values are necessarily always mutually exclusive... but sometimes it can be uncomfortable to straddle the gap.) The other thing that makes me wonder if it's a cultural gap is that you mentioned he was going to be able to make twice as much as he was making before for doing the same thing. If it's the same work as before, what's the difference if not cultural? Learning to talk a certain way about the things you do, use more professional language, present yourself a certain way, and ditch the people you work with if you can earn more money doing the same thing. Then he's eroding his value for loyalty by learning to bullshit the people he work with on a regular basis, because he's acting in a way that's not how he normally acts, and he's established a precedent that he's willing to ditch his new coworkers for an entirely different batch if he can make more money by doing so. He might look at that and look at the friends and/or community he already has and decide he doesn't like where that path might lead him. That could also explain why he ghosted you. He might feel ashamed because he feels that he owes you for genuinely trying to help him. But how can he repay you except by accepting your help? And explaining where he's coming from would only lead to an ugly conflict or you convincing him that he's irrational and should just take the job -- but he's already decided he doesn't want to go that route. If he cuts all conflict, nukes it from orbit, then he can get on with his life however he wants to.

brightball 5y ago
Without too much detail, he came from a really bad home environment. Ran away from home at 16 and was 22 when I was helping him out. The only thing that made any sense to me was some type of loyalty to the place he was working (commercial HVAC company) but it always seemed like this place treated him badly. He’d been there for almost 3 years though with the prospect of a raise dangled in front of him like a carrot and never materializing.
- buescher 5y ago
  If his current employer was a mom and pop, he may have owed the owner money on screwball terms, from deductions from his paycheck (unless he left) to "you don't have to pay this back unless you leave".
  - brightball 5y ago
    From my reviews of his finances, nothing like that ever came up.
    - buescher 5y ago
      I knew someone like that, and I always suspected he owed his boss money. Turned down a job with better benefits with a large, much more secure company to take a counteroffer from the entrepreneur who was going broke. He also had this weird bond with the employer that mistreated him and kept dangling a raise (real soon now) in front of him.

emj 5y ago

All we can do is try hard not hurt people with our version of good will. I've done the same with the same outcome, one of those people went on and made an impact and is cited frequently here, but not because of any help from me.

clove 5y ago
You gotta give everyone a chance if you can. I don't see why anyone should feel bad for giving someone an opportunity that is later thrown away. You did the right thing by giving someone that opportunity; whether he takes it or not is up to him. If everyone in the world thought like you, the world would be a better place. Unfortunately, this world is full of nepotism and tribalism. But people like you (and the parent commenter) help balance it out.