Comment by sdegutis

> I often feel there's still an imbalance. I feel like I owe something more

Debt is related to value, which is inherently subjective. In nature, nothing reproducable is one yard long, so we create something and call it a yard, and that first thing becomes the standard. The same is true economically; there's no way to measure what one loaf of bread is inherently worth. Even the time and resources needed to produce it vary depending on countless circumstances. A man with a bread factory will have a much easier time producing one loaf than a homeless man.

The same is true for pain. What's as trivial as a small papercut to one person may be overwhelmingly traumatic to another person, and another can handle losing a limb as easily as losing a pen. Countless variable psychological circumstances prevent us from making any true measurement of debt.

But justice requires that we try our best and move on. So we create economies out of barter and then gold and then bills and then credit. Or we create justice systems that are constantly flowing and changing in their understanding of right and wrong, and also value and loss.

It may be that some people who helped you had no difficulty. I do remember a teacher telling us once to be careful of what we say, because we never know which things we say will stick with someone forever with deep profoundness. Which goes to show that a small off the cuff comment has the very real potential to contribute toward making someone's life significantly better or significantly worse, yet the comment took almost no thought or effort. It cost little.

There's a moment in a play written by Karol Wojtyla in the 1940s, where Adam Chmielowski asks Madame Helena what it costs her to play Ophelia or Lady MacBeth. She replies, "in a way, it costs me all my life. It is a strange ransom; every time I pay it all over again."

I have met many people who are convinced that they have been wronged so grievously that the offender must pay every last penny they have or ever will make, and suffer every second of this life as much as possible, and they hope Hell exists purely so that the offender's suffering may not be relieved by the most torturous death imaginable. Such a person will never be satisfied or happy.

For the little it's worth, my recommendation is to repay people with what good value you justly and reasonably estimate that you owe them for the good they have done to you, and be done with it. If they consider it too much or too little, accomodate them a little, but only within reason. Inversely, if anyone has wronged you, consider their debt paid to you already, since this costs you nothing, whereas exacting justice is tiresome and restless. Besides, forgiving someone's debt to you gives them encouragement to improve, whereas exacting it discourages them and puts them on the defense. That's not to say you shouldn't insist that society as a whole have justice also, for example by calling the police when a legitimate crime has occurred to you or someone else. I'm only talking about the debt in context of two humans.