We’ve been so obsessed with protecting our peace, we’ve forgotten how to inconvenience ourselves for the sake of others.
Somewhere along the way, the world convinced us that the highest form of self-respect is retreat — that the most enlightened thing we can do is draw the blinds, lock the door, and guard our energy with military precision. We’re living in a time when the phrase “set boundaries” is used as both a genuine tool for survival and a shield against accountability.
But if we take a step back — remove the Instagram carousel aesthetics, the therapist-talk vocabulary, the self-help slogans we’ve absorbed into our bones — a quieter truth emerges: community cannot exist without inconvenience. Human relationships require a kind of friction. A willingness. A stretch. Something that we give not because it fits neatly into our daily planner, but because showing up for people is how we affirm that the world is not just a series of parallel solitudes.
We mistake discomfort for danger now. We treat every ask as an intrusion. And in doing so, we slowly starve the connections that once sustained us.
There’s a strange paradox at play: we praise vulnerability while doing everything in our power to avoid the vulnerability of being needed. To be needed is to be claimed. To be responsible. To be present. And presence — real presence — demands time, demands effort, demands a bit of ourselves that could have gone toward something quieter or easier.
We don’t talk enough about the moral dimension of this.
Not the sanitized, therapeutic version — the human one.
Because historically, community was built on favors, on borrowed ingredients, on long conversations in kitchens, on someone showing up when you didn’t ask but silently hoped they would. It was built on inconvenience as a form of care. We used to know that being a good friend sometimes meant being tired the next day. That compassion sometimes meant compromise. That love, in all its forms, was textured by effort.
But now? We’ve swung the pendulum so far toward self-protection that we refuse to be touched by anyone else’s weight.
To be clear: boundaries matter. Rest matters. Autonomy matters. But we’ve treated these things as if they are the entire philosophy of living, rather than a single chapter in a much larger book on humanity. What we’ve lost in the process is the understanding that interdependence is not a threat — it’s a foundation.
And maybe that’s the part we need to relearn.
That a balanced life is not one where we avoid every demand, but one where we discern which demands are holy. Which ones shape us. Which ones tether us back to the world in moments when we cannot find our own footing.
I say all this knowing my own flaw sits on the opposite end of the spectrum — I give too much of myself, too often, to too many people, too little, not at all. I stretch in ways that sometimes feel unsustainable. But even from that place, I still believe deeply in the necessity of showing up. In the quiet, unglamorous, un-aesthetic commitment to one another.
The bigger picture is simple:
If we all pull away to protect our peace, then what peace is actually left?
And who will be there to recognize us when we finally step back out?
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