binocular wrote:Exactly. The giver sometimes considers something to be a gift that to the (prospective) recipient is poison.
For instance, my partner works with an elderly manager who was just transferred to his store from a different store where he had worked a long time.
IMO, and obv take this with a grain of salt accordingly, this newer elderly manager (he has been at the new location for about a year now) evidently struggles, as many at his age do, and as I might too one day, with feelings of uselessness and feeling undervalued, at work, at home, in society, etc, essentially on account of age. Which is perfectly fine. No one is "not allowed" to feel bad for whatever reason, be it justified or unjustified.
Where this becomes relevant to the discussion on "helping" is when he makes up for this (feelings of uselessness, inadequacy, etc.) by frequently shutting down the whole store to lecture employees on proper store protocol, how he used to do things "back in the day", etc, always making sure to make a point about how useful he is: "After all, if I wasn't here, no one would be telling you this."
The issue is that these stoppages aren't actually in the interest of helping to run the store, very rarely have new or useful information, and make everyone's day worse off because they are unable to complete the tasks they must complete by the end of the day, on account of the frequent stoppages.
He frames these stoppages as "help" and speaks about how glad everyone must be that he is there to tell them proper protocol. His "help" is actually the opposite, and is slightly pathological, given that such a transparent motive is behind it, as much as I sympathize with what he is probably going through.
This is now off-topic, though, I realize, and shoud probably be it's own topic