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Being nice: listening with genuine empathy to someone complaining about their life while resisting the urge to complain about yours in turn
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Niceness is the basis of reciprocity in emotional labor (I'll be nice to you today when you're feeling low, you return favor when I'm low)
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Reciprocal niceness is basis of what I called 'loserdom' in the gervais principle. But there is also such a thing as emotional capitalism.
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This is being nice without requiring reciprocal niceness, but requiring *different* behavior in response such as creative output
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Service emotional labor breaks reciprocity for direct cash compensation: you be nice to me, I pay you money. It's a weak scheme.
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Managerial emotional labor otoh, breaks reciprocity in niceness to converts emotional capital into economic. Much better.
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But that's still lossy zero-sum/negative sum. There's a net cognitive cost to it. You have to be clueless enough to not notice the drain.
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The most powerful mode is what I call emotional capital mining: generating EmCap reserves faster than relationships draw them down
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Renewing your emotional capital by going for a walk in the woods is like panning for gold. There are deeper, more industrial-scale ways
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Generating emotional capital requires caring relationships with non-non-living parts of the universe. Creative work, exploration, etc
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