Yesterday I gave six hours.
Six hours on a Friday afternoon, walking someone through system design — the kind of preparation that determines whether a career pivots or stays stuck. By the end he sent a voice message. Short, warm, genuinely grateful. And before the message was finished, he was already asking what else I could help with.
I listened to the whole thing. Then I put my phone down.
I have been doing this for as long as I can remember.
It started when I was young — good with computers before anyone else in my circle was, a few steps ahead in a way that made me useful early. In Israel the army race begins at sixteen, when you start thinking about which unit you want and how to get there. I had a head start from years of programming, building things on my own, learning in a way no one taught me. And the thing about a head start is that people notice. At first they were jealous. Then, when they saw I was always willing to help, they stopped being jealous and started coming to me instead.
It was never just technical help. A close friend had a real problem with self-confidence, with reading what was happening in a room. I went out with him constantly — talking, watching, pointing at things he wasn’t seeing. I taught him how to hear what people were saying without saying it. How to read a face, a pause, the way someone’s posture shifts when they’re uncomfortable. He used to be in car crashes the way some people catch colds. Four in half a year. He stopped crashing.
During corona, another friend started coming to my parents’ house every day. Just to be around. He’d sit across from me and watch me work — the screen, the calls, the code. He wasn’t a developer, didn’t have a clear direction. I started teaching him automation testing, and he was doing fine, but I noticed something: every time I opened Figma, something changed in him. He leaned forward. His eyes moved differently over the screen. I stopped what I was doing one afternoon and told him he needed to become a designer.
He didn’t see it. He pushed back a little. I told him to open Figma and build something.
He did. I gave him feedback. He took every note and came back the next day with something better. These days he’s going to one of the most prestigious design colleges in the world to study 3D. He got there from a table in my parents’ house in the middle of a pandemic, watching me work. I taught myself to code because no one taught me. I gave what I never had.
None of them knew what was happening inside while I was doing all of this.
The depression was there the way it has always been there — underneath everything, present in the days when I showed up anyway and gave anyway and still somehow had more to give. Visible, if anyone was looking. But no one was looking in that direction. When you are the person with answers, people don’t think to ask if you have questions. When you are the one everyone calls, no one calls to ask how you are.
I kept waiting. Session after session. Conversation after conversation. Some part of me was always waiting for the moment when the call came and there was nothing on the other end of it except: how are you, really. Not to vent. Not for advice. Just that.
It never came.
Eventually I started cutting people off. Slowly at first — protecting myself before I hit zero. Building relationships differently, with limits built into the foundation. I gave less. Set edges where there had been none before.
It helped.
And it felt like disappearing.
Because giving is not something I do. It is what I am. The energy I put into people — the hours, the attention, the careful reading of what they can’t see in themselves yet — that comes from something deep. It costs everything it costs because it means everything it means. And the version of me who protects himself by pulling back is quieter. Safer. A version I don’t entirely recognize when I look at him.
I don’t need money back. I don’t need the hours returned.
I need someone to sit with what I gave them long enough to feel the weight of it. Not run to the next thing they can take. Just stop. Feel it. Say it out loud: you changed something for me. Say it once, mean it, let it land — before asking what else I can do.
That’s it. That’s all of it.
But people don’t work that way. They receive and they move. The gratitude is real but it’s light — it surfaces for a moment and doesn’t sink in, and they’re already thinking about the next session, the next question, the next time something gets hard and they know who to call. I’ve been burning for years trying to get someone to feel what it costs.
It’s ok.
That’s the nature of people.