The costs nobody invoices

The Mayor opened the call in his usual way: a little practical scene-setting, a little weather, and then straight into the uneasy heart of the theme. Ritesh was still joining from Bengaluru, while Ismar was already present from Campo Grande, where the day had started bright and hot — 27°C at nine in the morning — the kind of warmth that makes problems feel both distant and oddly sharper.

The Mayor wanted to talk about when values collide, when the moral “shape” of a situation changes because the system around it shifts responsibility, hides accountability, or quietly pressures people to accept what shouldn’t be theirs to carry. To give the discussion a frame, he offered two small stories that were not small at all once you looked closely.

Three weeks earlier, the door of his shower had broken — not the whole door, just a tiny wheel that allowed the glass panel to slide. The kind of part that should be replaceable. Instead, in his European reality, it wasn’t. The wheel couldn’t be bought on its own. The only “solution” was absurdly oversized: replace the entire door, almost as if you had to buy a new house to fix a piece of plastic. The second story was about his mother. She’d had a minor accident with her car — nothing dramatic — and her insurer said they would handle it. But then the assessor sent a message requesting documents, mileage, photos: tasks that belonged to the assessor, not to the family. The Mayor tried, couldn’t make sense of it, and pushed back. The insurer apologized and agreed to send the assessor properly to the garage.

It stayed in his mind, because to him it wasn’t just inconvenience. It felt like a trend: responsibility sliding downward to the person least equipped, least paid, least protected — while the professional still invoices as if the work happened.

He brought up IKEA as a symbol of the same logic: people doing the assembly themselves, told it’s cheaper, told it’s “efficient,” often left with missing screws and a sense that they are now responsible for the final outcome. And then he widened the lens. In modern systems — social media, apps, platforms — the distance between the person with the “good intention” and the person who receives the harm can be enormous. A Silicon Valley executive may be perfectly decent in conversation, yet the algorithmic machine built around them can amplify insecurity, anxiety, obsession, and damage in users they will never meet. When harm appears, the blame often falls on the wrong layer: individuals are told they lack resilience, they need a better mindset, they should pay for a self-help solution. Bandaids go everywhere; root causes remain untouched. The Mayor wanted to explore that space: not just “who is wrong,” but how values get distorted inside systems until everyone feels both guilty and trapped.

With that, he turned first to Ismar, asking him to recall a recent moment when responsibility had been shifted onto him — when he had been pressured to adapt, participate, or carry extra work that wasn’t clearly his.

Ismar took the question in his own direction at first, the way he often does — starting from a larger observation about human nature. He had recently heard people say, in Brazil, that money itself was the root of society’s problems: money corrupts, money destroys. He didn’t agree. To Ismar, money was only an amplifier of intention. The same money could buy food or medicine; it could also buy cocaine. The moral issue wasn’t money — it was what people did to obtain it, and what they did with it afterward. A cousin of his, a pastor, had said society’s problem was money, and Ismar had argued back: even a small group of humans will generate conflict because someone will always try to gain advantage.

Then he brought the conversation down to something painfully concrete: his dental treatment.

Two years earlier, Ismar had started a treatment for a long-standing problem — his top and bottom teeth touching improperly, a kind of malocclusion that traced back to an old childhood impact. He had already spent a lot of money over the years, without solving it. This new attempt became the worst kind of modern experience: paid expertise paired with a refusal to truly listen.

The dentist, a senior professional with more than forty years of experience, fitted a device that caused Ismar jaw pain. Ismar said early and repeatedly that it wasn’t comfortable, that something felt wrong. The dentist offered two options, and when Ismar asked what would happen if the first didn’t work, he was told it could be changed later. But later never arrived. Each complaint was met with the same soft dismissal: it was normal, it would settle, it would pass. Instead the discomfort grew into real pain, and Ismar eventually reached the point where he refused to continue.

That was when the collision of values became clear. In Ismar’s mind, there was no moral problem with wanting to earn money. But in a human relationship — especially one built on trust and professional ethics — money should not become the most important thing. In this case, Ismar felt the dentist valued the payment more than the solution, and worse than that: more than the harm he had caused. When Ismar asked for his money back and for support to address the new pain, the dentist refused. He insisted he deserved the money because he had “worked,” even though the original problem remained unsolved and a new injury now existed. The dentist redirected him onward — first to another dentist, then to physiotherapy — and Ismar spent more money for months. The system had moved on smoothly. Ismar had not.

To Ismar, the core value under pressure was virtue — honesty, responsibility, human decency inside a professional role. A good professional, in his view, would have changed the treatment earlier, or admitted limits, or referred him out, or returned the money when the outcome was failure paired with harm. The deeper betrayal wasn’t only the pain; it was the sense that the relationship had been reduced to a transaction, with no moral accountability once damage occurred.

Ritesh joined during the dentist story, apologizing for being late — the link had dropped while he was trying to connect. The Mayor quickly recapped the frame and then asked Retesh the same question: could he recall a situation, outside of formal work, where he had been pulled into responsibility that wasn’t clearly his?

Ritesh’s answer arrived immediately and in layers, as his answers often do. He described a pattern that began with good intention: courtesy, friendliness, the habit of helping. He had once filled out a government job application form for a friend after work hours, at home, to save the friend the trip to a cyber café — a common Indian service where people pay to fill forms, book tickets, or submit online paperwork because they lack devices, internet, or confidence with the process. At first it felt simple and humane. He could do it. Why not do it.

But the first favor became a label. Now people came not just with his friend’s forms, but forms for the friend’s sisters, then other relatives, then people with no direct connection to Ritesh at all. The requests multiplied because the door had been opened once, politely, without conditions.

When Ritesh lived alone, it didn’t feel like a burden. Time was flexible, evenings were his. But after marriage, the consequence became visible. His wife began to notice what Ritesh himself had barely named: time that belonged to the relationship was being consumed by other people’s administrative problems. She would be ready with food while Ritesh sat at the laptop saying, “ten minutes,” only for a glitch — a missing photo, a rejected signature, a last-day deadline — to turn ten minutes into thirty, and thirty into an hour. The promise broke repeatedly. His wife wasn’t angry about generosity. She was sad about absence, and sadness in a marriage carries weight.

The Mayor listened carefully and saw the chain forming: a friend asks for help, Ritesh helps, the task becomes bigger than expected, and the “innocent bystander” — his wife — pays the emotional cost. The system, again, had outsourced responsibility to the most accessible person.

When asked what, exactly, felt uncomfortable now, Ritesh described not resignation but a dawning awareness. The discomfort wasn’t just the extra work; it was the way it collided with two values that mattered to him.

One value was the readiness to help — a personal identity he held with pride: being the person who shows up, no questions asked. The second value was reliability inside commitment: being someone whose word has weight, especially with the one person he had promised to build a life with. The favors were not merely time-consuming; they were slowly reshaping how he appeared in his own home. Each “ten minutes” that became an hour felt, to him, like a small lie — not malicious, but corrosive. It threatened his self-respect, and it threatened the trust his wife placed in his promises.

Ritesh also explained why people kept coming to him. It was not that his friend lacked internet or a phone. The gap was skill and confidence, and perhaps something else: unwillingness to learn once a helper had been found. Ritesh had tried to teach, step by step, even offering to create accounts and share logins so the friend could fill basic details and return only when stuck. Yet the friend returned with pre-filled documents asking Ritesh to copy and paste — outsourcing even the simplest effort. Over time, Ritesh began to sense entitlement: the belief that asking was a right, that Ritesh’s competence was community property. Ritesh’s original moral motive — to prevent people being exploited at cyber cafés — now had an unintended cost: his own peace, his own relationship time, his own ability to say no.

At this point, The Mayor shifted the discussion to the deeper mechanism behind it all: systems with good intentions producing harm far downstream. He brought social media into the conversation — Silicon Valley values vs algorithmic outcomes — and asked how both men saw responsibility when a “decent” person builds something that ends up harming a teenager somewhere else.

Ismar’s answer drew from memory and from a kind of moral realism. He recalled an older form of harmful content: pornographic magazines sold openly, sometimes even bought by parents who didn’t understand what was inside. He had also watched a documentary about dangerous online games where adolescents were drawn into contact with adults, leading to crimes. To him, the difficulty was structural: platforms cannot easily verify age, and teenagers can simply use a parent’s account. The question of responsibility, in Ismar’s view, leaned heavily toward parents because the platform cannot truly distinguish a sixteen-year-old from an adult without a verification mechanism that is both enforceable and respected. He described it as nearly impossible for a social media company to manage perfectly.

The Mayor pushed back gently but pointedly, using an old-person’s advantage: he and Ismar had lived before the internet. They knew life without social media. Ritesh’s generation did not. So how could responsibility be placed on parents when parents themselves were often less literate in technology than their children?

Ritesh answered with stories that made the problem feel unavoidable. He described parents who were not educated enough to detect lies or manipulation — like a classmate who told his parents he needed money to buy a machine for a lab, took a large amount, spent it on partying and social life in Bengaluru, failed the year, and then watched his parents arrive demanding the “machine” back, only to discover the story was false. Ritesh extended the analogy to phones: cheap, accessible, everywhere — and parents often unaware how to control notifications, ads, settings, time limits, or content filters. Even adults in his own circle didn’t know how to disable constant alerts. Children, meanwhile, were “tech-heavy,” faster than parents, able to hide behavior in ways older generations couldn’t track.

Ritesh rejected the idea that big tech companies were purely well-intentioned. He pointed out that even tech leaders restrict their own children’s screen time, which signals that they understand the product’s addictive design. He cited everyday domestic realities: a child eating while watching YouTube, becoming addicted not only to children’s content but to the wider platform’s suggestions; parents refusing to use safer “YouTube Kids” settings because the child protests once addiction has formed; the difficulty of imposing strict routines in Indian households compared to the more rigid bedtime discipline he sees portrayed in Western media.

He also recalled recent tragedies: children influenced by online tasks, escalating to self-harm. Whether every detail was fully understood or not, his point was sharp: the internet is not like a magazine hidden in a room. It is constant, private, and fast. Parents can’t control what they don’t understand, and they often don’t understand it.

The Mayor introduced an institutional counterweight: he had read that the European Union was pressuring TikTok to adjust mechanisms to make them less addictive for children. But even that, he noted, would take years — and the damage in between was unknowable. Commercial interests fight regulation, and algorithms evolve faster than policy.

From there, the conversation returned to the personal collision of values, because this was where the theme became emotionally real. The Mayor asked Ritesh how it feels when the burden shifts: when he does something out of goodwill and someone else — like his wife — tells him he doesn’t have the right mindset, or that he is doing something wrong by not “going with the flow.” Does that kind of critique cause self-doubt?

Retesh admitted that it does. His instinct is not to deny criticism; it is to consider the possibility that he is wrong. He described himself as someone trained, while growing up, to doubt his capability. So when someone questions his actions, he tends to accept the critique and reflect — sometimes too quickly. In this case, his wife’s intervention forced him to see what he hadn’t seen: helping a friend is one thing; being turned into a free service for the friend’s entire network is another.

The Mayor, with a kind of weary affection, suggested that Ritesh was lucky: his wife had applied the brakes before the pattern became permanent. Then he offered a sentence Janita had once said — a sentence that seemed to fit the entire call: priorities lead to misunderstandings. What one person treats as a priority may not be someone else’s priority, and conflict grows in the gap. Retesh’s short-term priority was being helpful. His long-term priority — the one that would shape his life — was the relationship with his wife. A friend’s friend might be upset briefly; a wife’s disappointment lives in the home.

Ismar’s situation didn’t offer such an adjustable solution. His conflict had moved beyond inconvenience into permanence. The Mayor acknowledged this with unusual heaviness, because he recognized the shape of it from his own life: his wife’s life-changing accident two and a half years earlier had caused permanent damage to her ankle and shoulder. One day, he said, she would need a final surgery that would lock ankle to leg, removing flexibility forever. No compensation could restore what had been lost. Ismar’s dental harm felt similar: even after physiotherapy, he was not back to where he had been before. The body had changed, and that reality sat outside the reach of money.

Here, values did not collide in theory — they collided in time. The Mayor admitted that his own values had shifted. In the beginning, he had seen the person who caused his wife’s injury as a young man who made a stupid mistake — drugs, youth, reckless behavior, tragic outcome. He hadn’t wanted the boy’s life destroyed. Two and a half years later, facing the permanent horizon of his wife’s injury, he was changing. He began to wonder whether the boy should carry a lasting consequence, a lasting reminder — not out of revenge, but out of moral gravity. The Mayor described it plainly: the insurance company had paid a significant amount, but it would never compensate for the loss. If no one seeks recovery from the boy, then the system is again absorbing harm in a way that leaves the originating actor untouched.

Even his view on marijuana had hardened through lived consequence. Where he once thought, “why not,” he now leaned toward strict prohibition because he had witnessed how a small choice, a few joints, can cascade into irreversible damage for someone else. He saw this as the core tragedy of modern life: people rarely imagine consequences to the end because they can’t, or because they never move in those circles. But fate arrives without asking.

The call ended under the pressure of time. The Mayor apologized for overrunning, Ritesh hinted at experimenting with alternative European meeting tools in the future, and both men stepped back into their lives — one into Brazilian heat and unresolved legal frustration, one into an Indian marriage where kindness and boundaries now had to learn to live together.

What remained, after the goodbye, was not a neat moral conclusion. It was something messier and more honest: the recognition that values don’t usually collapse in a single dramatic choice. They erode, shift, and clash inside small moments — a form filled out “just once,” a professional who refuses responsibility, a platform that rewards engagement over care, a body that never becomes what it was again. And in that slow collision, people discover what they truly value — not by discussing it, but by being forced to live it.