When it comes to experiences that have demotivated me, there are a couple of incidents that stand out. Some are rather recent in time and involve people that I still depend on, so I can not currently go public about them. I will instead choose a story which happened in my childhood which may seem innocent now, but the disappointment that I and some of my friends experienced changed us, and not for the better.
Back in the 70s in Sweden there was something called “school police”. This meant that a couple of six-graders were given the responsibility to watch a pedestrian crossing (no traffic lights), the idea being to help even younger student to cross the street and stop/warn them if cars were approaching. I belonged to a half-dozen pupils who took turns with this task. Throughout a whole school year we sacrificed a number of early mornings and breaks in all kinds of weather — sun, rain snow. The reward for this work was never expressed explicitly, but we knew there was some kind of reward in the end — this was a tradition we knew about from older pupils, and it often lead to some kind of field trip for the children involved. However, at the end of the school year our teacher used the reward given by the school to arrange a trip for the whole class. The extra bonus that we in the “school police” group had been looking forward to was gone. All those mornings out in the cold for nothing. This changed us, the trust we as children had for our teachers took a hard blow. It took long time before I did some kind of volunteer work again.
Nothing was done after the fact, the teacher was an authority figure you did not really question, this was a time when even parents respected teachers to a degree that was not always healthy. In retrospect, we could have done more to at least try to communicate, with parents, other teachers or even the dean. But even if we had been successful the damage was done.
PS. The school police tradition is long gone. At some point it was realized that 12-year olds were not mature for this task, in particular with increasing traffic over time.