I recently joined a WeChat group called Low-Key, Practical, Outstanding Young Chinese People. The group was created by an open-source developer on GitHub. I did not get in through any special connection, of course. The title here came from something else that happened afterward.
One weekend, with nothing urgent to do, I cleaned up my bookshelf and found a few books I was no longer using. I thought about what to do with them for a while. I did not want to throw them into recycling, because that felt like letting the knowledge disappear with them. So I decided it would be better to give them away.
I posted a message in the group, and almost immediately several people added me on WeChat to ask for the books. In the end, three people reserved a total of eight books, and I mailed them out on Sunday afternoon.
I was not looking for anything in return. I did not expect anyone to repay me, and I was not hoping for gratitude either. I simply wanted those books to keep “living” in someone else’s hands.
What happened next was interesting.
One of the three was exceptionally polite. From beginning to end, you could feel a kind of sincere respect and gratitude in the way he spoke. The other two were also very thankful, just not to the same degree. After the books arrived, that first person even posted about them publicly as if he had received something precious, specifically to say thanks. I honestly had not expected that.
To be clear, I had no personal interest tied to any of them. We were not relatives, not friends, and there was no exchange of benefits involved. We just happened to cross paths.
But the whole thing led me to a question.
If you were facing a promotion decision and had to choose one person out of these three, could you really make a perfectly rational and fair choice once this incident had already become part of the background?
Maybe the question sounds a bit naïve, but push it a little further. Suppose among the three, person A is clearly better in both technical skill and management ability, but he has a terrible temper and constantly insults people. The other two are not as capable as he is. What would you choose?
Strip everything else away, and the real question is this: when people make decisions, are they actually relying on reason, or are they being guided by emotion and preference?
The instinctive answer is often, “Be rational.” But in reality, that is impossible. No one can completely separate emotion and personal preference from judgment. What we really do is weigh costs and benefits, try to balance competing factors, and choose what looks like the best available option—the one that brings the greatest overall gain from our own point of view.
We cannot make purely rational choices. At best, we can try to arrive at the optimal answer.
Seen from that angle, being a “connected person” is only one visible form of a much broader reality. Exchanges involving power, money, favor, and influence are bound to exist as well. But those are discussions that drift a bit too far from ordinary life.
What this small episode made me realize is simpler than that: people like to imagine that decisions can be clean, objective, and untouched by feeling. In practice, they almost never are.