Someone helps a stranger change a tyre on the side of the road.

Nobody claps. Nobody hears about it. The stranger says thanks, maybe gets a name, probably doesn't. The person who stopped goes back to their car and keeps driving, and within a few minutes they've mostly forgotten it happened.

That's the whole event. Nothing else gets added to it.

Marcus Aurelius wrote about this directly. He said that when you've done a good act and someone else has benefited from it, why look for a third thing on top — credit, praise, some kind of return. The good act was the thing. It doesn't need anything added to it to be complete.

Most of us aren't wired that way, or we didn't used to be. We do the good thing and some part of us wants it noticed. Wants it counted. Wants, at minimum, for the other person to know it cost us something. I'm no exception. It feels good to be noticed for doing good things. I'd be lying if I said otherwise.

But Marcus's point was that wanting the third thing turns the good act into a transaction. And the moment it's a transaction, it stops being a duty and starts being an investment with an expected return.

I feel the pull of this constantly. Not the noble version — the practical, daily, slightly exhausting version.

Someone needs advice. A mate needs a hand. There's a request that lands at a time I don't have the capacity for it, and I say yes anyway, because the alternative is someone needing help and not getting it.

I know this stretches me thin. I know there's a version of my week where I say no more often, protect my time, put it back into my own business, my own family, my own rest. I know, on paper, that version makes more sense.

I still say yes. Often. Sometimes, too often.

I'm not saying that to sound virtuous. I say it because I genuinely haven't worked out where the line should sit, and I'd guess most people who overcommit to helping others haven't either. It's not a solved problem. It's an ongoing negotiation between what you owe the people around you and what you owe yourself.

Here's the part that actually matters, though — the part that isn't about me at all.

Every single person reading this has been helped by someone who didn't need to help them. An accountant who made a suggestion. A boss who gave a second chance instead of a first strike. A stranger who stopped. A mate who drove across town at a bad hour because it needed doing and they were the one who could.

None of those people were owed anything for it. They just did the thing because it was in front of them and they were capable of doing it.

If not them, then who.

That's the actual question underneath all of this. Not "should I help." Everyone already knows the answer to that. The real question is what happens to a world where enough people stop asking it — where everyone gets a little too careful with their time, a little too protective of their own ledger, and the person on the side of the road just sits there because everyone driving past has decided their afternoon matters more.

I don't think duty needs to be dramatic to count. It's not the mountain rescue or the public sacrifice. It's mostly the small, unglamorous, forgettable version — the phone call, the favour, the couch someone helped move on a Saturday they didn't really have spare.

Do the good thing. Let it be finished when it's finished.

No third thing required.

Until next time,

Broden Johnson