Every so often I find myself in a predicament, and more often than not it’s the fault of others.

I was editing a friend’s paper the other night — a friend in graduate school — only to find while checking the sources cited that this person is a blatant plagiarist. It’s a common occurrence when editing papers as a favor, but the moment of discovery that my friends are lazy half-assers is always followed by annoyance and then insant judgment. Inevitably, it results in my taking those friends down several pegs in regards to respectability.

Let me be more specific with what I take issue with: when you copy and paste whole blocks of sentences from a source, make no effort to revise those sentences or at the very least to phrase it differently, especially to keep the entire paper consistent so as to not draw suspicion to yourself (eg: the majority of the paper is littered with grammatical errors, devoid of any regard to proper format rules, and overall lacks any real substance, and then there are abrupt chunks of profoundly perceptive, well formulated passages that come out of nowhere), you are a tool.

I become conflicted in such situations and soon find myself asking existentialist questions. Plagiarizing is unethical to me as it's stealing someone else's work/words, but these are my close friends and they can't write for shit anyway, so do I let this go and never bring it up?

Do I refuse to edit a plagiarized paper and risk feeling bad if those friends never ask for help again down the line? Maybe we weren't meant to be friends to begin with? If they are ambitious and are putting themselves through grad school to garner the respect of others, but make no effort to write their own papers and still get far in life, is that proof that there is no God?

I don't mean to be so severe, but that is who I am.

I am also optimistic. I am optimistic despite life being long and cold and arduous and the journey really just a solitary walk.