Popularity can disappear in a weekend. Self-respect stays if you don’t trade it away.

Standing in a school is held up by other people’s attention, which means it can be withdrawn over one rumour, one argument, one Saturday. Anything built that way is borrowed. What you think of your own conduct is the one holding that cannot be voted down, unless you spend it buying the other kind.

Watch the trades you get offered this week: laughing at somebody, dropping a friend who has become inconvenient, going along with something you know is wrong. Those are the transactions. Decline one and notice the cost was smaller than it looked from outside.