At This Stage, Treating People to Dinner Has Almost Zero ROI
Twenty years ago, things were different.
Resources were scarce and conditions were limited. A good meal was a real, tangible form of respect and gratitude.
But now?
Most people are not short of that meal, and relationships are not built on one dinner.
Especially those setups that use “let me buy you coffee” or “let me take you to dinner” as the cover, while the real purpose is free consulting, asking for advice, or “picking your brain.”
On the surface it is hospitality. In reality, it treats your time, experience, and judgment as a free public resource.
Coffee is not valuable. Dinner is not valuable.
What is valuable is the attention and energy that are fully occupied for more than an hour while you sit there.
Having dinner with someone who can neither offer real value nor bring emotional ease, and only wants to extract something from you, is essentially using your time to subsidize their shortcut.
There are only two kinds of meals truly worth sitting down for.
One has a clear and equal exchange of value. No acting, no pretending to be close.
The other is relaxing in itself. Even silence does not feel tiring.
Every other meal is basically a drain:
overestimating the return a relationship can bring,
and underestimating the scarcity of your own time.
That is why I personally dislike this kind of “fake hospitality, real freeloading.”
Not because I am stingy,
but because it has no respect for time.
#hosting-dinner #value-for-money