Independence is an extremely important value to me and I journal about it a lot. Dependency is often caused by a power gradient of some sort, and can be emotional, financial, etc. One of the reasons I score high on the agreeableness scale is because I try to minimise the power gradient between myself and others where I have the advantage. This can manifest itself as people-pleasing.
There's a common way out of this dilemma at the surface level, which is that you might not actually be doing somebody a favour by helping them. Imagine for example helping your child by giving them sweets when they ask for them. The child is happy but you've inadvertently harmed them and haven't acted in their best interest. While taking the agency away from a child to determine what is in their best interest is obvious, it's not so obvious in other cases. How do you really know that you know better?
Well, recently I read about another way to slice this. In a book called "Toxic Charity", Dr Robert Lupton describes 5 steps to dependency:
The more you give a man a fish, the more you progress along these steps. Then when you stop, there's nothing but resentment from both sides!
Lupton was mainly focusing on western nonprofit and church aid (he's a minister himself), but I think this applies at a micro scale too. He argues that one-way giving erodes dignity and self-sufficiency, and draws a distinction between Betterment and Development. Betterment is where the other person is passive and you just get to feel good for giving them a good or service. Development is to "teach a man to fish" as it were, so they build their ability to help themselves.
Inspired by the Hippocratic Oath, he wrote The Oath for Compassionate Service. Below are a few of these rules paraphrased/simplified and with the biblical parts removed.
While I'm not a Christian, I feel like he's hit the nail on the head with many of his takes, where they weren't justified through verses. He was able to articulate quite well the potential indignity of charity as well. Beyond that, you may displace local labour or undercut local economies. This maps quite well to people no longer relying on a sustainable source of help and letting their support networks atrophy.
So the next time you feel the urge to reflexively help, ask yourself if you're really doing the person a favour. When you fix their printer, are you depriving them of the ability to fix it themselves? Worse, are you depriving them of the learning the ability to teach themselves how to troubleshoot in general? They should experience short-term pain for long-term gains.
And as a bonus, the final point on the list resonates a lot with me as a startup founder and major proponent of The Mom Test! Building cars instead of faster horses! Teach a man to drive?