Most people forget being kind and genuine is the ultimate way to build up your social capital. being transactional ultimate -EV game brought up between big cities - hong kong shanghai and london, and spent some brief internship time at luxury fashion PR, I have seen a lot of transactional people calculating what they can extract from people, but most people can sniff the ingenuity. don’t get me wrong. there’s nothing wrong with “social climbing” because most people want to surround themselves with people who are better than them to improve their life experience. but it’s the way of doing it being the problem. if one only thinks about whether they can get sth out of you, instead of being genuinely interested in you, your relationships with people are not going to grow deeper. at the end of the day, it’s who is there for you when you’re at your lowest. transactional people would have been long gone because there’s nothing to extract and only come back when you’re succeeding again. be genuine. be interested in people’s lore. build relationship.