“I had to do it too” — when an old cost becomes the norm

It is Friday after 5 p.m. Olek closes his laptop while Marek is still working.

— I’m done. This can wait until Monday.
— When I started, staying late was part of proving people could rely on you.

Olek is asking whether that cost was ever necessary. Marek hears a question about whether years of his own effort meant anything.

What really happened

Marek once went through a demanding norm and paid for it in time, stress or effort. When Olek suggests that newer employees should not have to pay the same price, Marek may hear more than a process change: “what I went through was pointless.” Defending the old rule can then become partly about defending the meaning of his own experience. Olek is starting from a different point: if a cost is not necessary to achieve the goal, repeating it does not become fair merely because earlier employees had to bear it. One person is seeking equality of experience; the other wants to remove an unnecessary cost.

What the research says

People can become more inclined to justify a system or ritual when it is longstanding, widespread and something they have already invested in. Research on “trials by fire” for newcomers shows that observers are more likely to justify difficult initiation practices when those practices are long-established traditions in a tightly integrated group—a pattern connected to system justification (Mawritz et al., 2019). A related mechanism is effort justification: the effort we have already invested can increase the value we attach to what we achieved through it. That does not mean every difficult path is bad. It means that “I suffered too” is not, by itself, evidence that suffering was a necessary part of learning.

How to handle it

Instead of asking “was it hard?”, ask “what exactly did the difficulty teach, and could we teach the same thing at lower cost?” You can respect Marek’s experience without reproducing its burden: “What you went through was real effort. Precisely because you went through it, we now know what can be improved.” The general rule: fairness does not have to mean equal suffering. If the value of an experience can be preserved while an unnecessary cost is removed, improving the system does not invalidate the people who paid that cost before.

How Empatyzer and Em can help

Empatyzer can help Marek understand why Olek’s proposal sounds like a challenge to his own history even though Olek is only talking about the future. Motivators related to order, status, honour or fairness can make past hardship part of the answer to “what did I earn this through?” Em can help Olek propose change without stripping that meaning away: “The harder path you went through was real effort. But we do not have to require the same cost from the next person if it no longer adds value.” It can also help Marek separate recognition of his own effort from the need to reproduce that effort in others. Micro-lessons reinforce the idea that fairness does not always mean imposing an identical cost on each new generation of employees.