Why Should I Bother Being Kind When People Take Advantage of Me?

If we are kind, we become like the Creator, the upper force of love and bestowal that acts out of total kindness toward creation. It will then be better and easier for us both in this world and in the next world.

It might seem that being kind makes us vulnerable to being taken advantage of, and that we should thus operate in a way where we ourselves take advantage of others in order for them to not do the same to us. In some very small and limited circumstances, that might be somewhat right. But it is a very narrow and limited view, and overall, in life, it is not the case. When we gain a perspective of life as a whole, what we are all left with and where we end up afterward, then we see clearly that it is much better to be kind.

Moreover, we should not be kind with the expectation that kindness will return to us. Rather, kindness gives us the ability to understand why everything is made through that very quality of kindness, and how it is thus better to act out of kindness. We should therefore be kind because it is the quality that extends from the Creator toward creation, and for no other reason — that we wish to simply resemble that supreme quality in our lives, with no expectation of it returning to us.

Taking it another step deeper: the fact that we can even think and act kindly is already the influence of the Creator upon us, i.e., it is already our reward. In the meantime, there are plenty of people who try to make their way in life by taking advantage of others, manipulating and exploiting them, as it appears to them that it is the way to somewhat extract some enjoyment in life, and that it gives them more money, honor, and power. They end up calculating what enters their pockets, and might think they are happy as a result, but they are actually very far from being happy.

Moreover, such people get punished. At first, they will not understand that they are receiving a punishment, but it will happen. Such is the general law of nature in practice, that everything we do must be compensated for — good with good, and evil with evil.