How I removed a legacy behavior that optimized for likability—and paid for it with self-respect.

Context

I recently ran an audit on a behavioral pattern I had been running for years:

If (someone needs something)

→ respond immediately

→ say yes

→ be helpful

I thought this was a virtue.

In practice, it behaved like an anti-pattern:

It scaled poorly

It created hidden costs

It trained other people’s expectations in the wrong direction

So I treated it like deprecated code and started a refactor.

The Bug: Over-Availability as a Default State

The core issue wasn’t kindness.

It was this assumption:

My value = my availability

That assumption created predictable side effects:

No rate limiting on my time or energy

No validation of incoming requests

No distinction between urgent vs.…