I’ve noticed in life that being nice, helpful, honest, reliable, trustworthy rarely count for much.
For example when I was at school (and I still see the same thing happening now at my children’s school), horrible bully type kids can be the most popular and rarely get any kind of consequences for being nasty. It seems as though no one wants to get on the wrong side of the bullies.
My children play in football teams and one of the coaches always goes on about turning up to training, being a good team player, listening, trying your best. But the truth is they only want the best players. There are players that rarely turn up to training, are nasty to other kids, but because they are naturally talented players they still get to play a full game every week, get man of the match and so on
I see it happen at work. One of my colleagues got really badly bullied by another colleague she even had email proof and it went to HR but nothing happened to the bully colleague because she is admittedly good at her job and has experiences that others don’t.
It’s not always like that, one of my children never got picked for anything at primary school even though he tried his best, behaved etc but once he got to secondary his good nature paid off and they started actually rewarding effort and good behaviour but I do believe that often in life that the values we are told to have don’t really get you anywhere.