Maybe some, but certainly not all!
> The idea was that people would reciprocate enough that it'd make things easier for myself too.
Here is the flaw in your plan; it was a flaw in my plan too. In more naive days, I thought that too. Then at some point we realize what you did: people don't do good things, and you aren't going to change most of them.
That's when we can take a big step forward, and learn what true altruism, generosity, and most of all, what love is: It's caring for and doing good for people who don't 'deserve' it; who act like jerks and idiots, who even do bad things. Anyone who has done good in their life learns this lesson. That is love, the only love in any meaningful sense.
That truth is well known, but not always widely discussed. Look at the Gospels in Christianity, and everything that says we are all sinners. Look at stories of prophets in every culture: ignored, attacked, lynched. More contemporaneously, do you think people who do great good, like Washington or Gandhi or MLK, did not realize what you did about human nature? All those people, those religions, those philosophers - they all know. When Jefferson wrote 'All men are created equal, and are endowed with inalienable rights', he knew who he was writing about. When the framers of the Constitution wrote about forming 'a more perfect union', they knew that would be done would be 'of the people, by the people, and for the people' (as Lincoln said later) - and they knew about people.
And it's about you too. You're a sinner, and an asshole, and ignorant too, just like me. If that's not love, if love excludes those people, who loves you and me? Remember that ancient prayer: 'Forgive us our trespasses ...'.