better framework – A reader describes years of helping everyone around them—while fearing the cost of saying “no.” The response argues that the usual “boundaries” advice can miss the deeper issue, offering instead a Buddhist image of interconnected lives where protecting your ow
When “no” finally comes out, it doesn’t land like relief.
For one reader, the word feels like a moral violation. She’s the only child of divorced parents who both need help—just in radically different ways. One parent is “incredibly poor” and trying to take care of her grandparents. The other lacks computer literacy, and English isn’t their main language. She says she helps with “attention. money. and time whenever I can. ” because. as she puts it. “at the end of the day. we’re all we got.”.
That instinct to step in didn’t stay contained. During the very beginning of Covid, she drove to the ER in a rental car to help a different friend. A migrant mother on her corner. someone she passes every day. calls her for groceries—reassuring calls that arrive when the reader thinks deportation might be near. And one of her best friends went through a personal crisis and had to move out the same day; she packed everything.
She’s also been working on herself. “I’ve worked very hard over the last few years with a therapist to learn to say no and set boundaries — and I graduated from therapy!” the reader writes. But even with that progress, she doesn’t want to set limits. When she does say no. she says it’s because she fears what comes next: “if I say yes. I will fall down a slippery slope of absorbing more responsibility that isn’t mine to hold.”.
Still, she struggles with a deeper fear. Protecting herself can feel “like a slight at my own ideals.” Resentment follows anyway. “I’m so overextended. ” she writes. while insisting she doesn’t want to stop helping for moral or religious reasons—or because she worries she’ll be a “bad person.” What she cares about most. she says. is the “well-being of those in my orbit immensely.”.
The reply doesn’t argue with the compassion. It argues with the language.
Self-preservation matters. the editor writes. “every bit as important as self-sacrifice. ” especially for people who grew up “parentified” and focused on taking care of others’ needs. But the editor says the popular framing of “boundaries” doesn’t fit the reader’s intuition about how people are connected.
In the reader’s world. the familiar boundary definition—“a limit or edge that defines you as separate from others. ” with the phrase “where I end and where you begin”—can feel wrong. If you believe. as the editor does. that people are profoundly interconnected and shaping reality for one another. then a “sharp line” can seem less clarifying than confusing.
There’s a second problem too: the editor says some people use boundary talk as cover for avoidance. “Nope, I’m drawing a boundary!” is the example given—said when someone is being asked to do something hard or uncomfortable.
The response therefore pivots away from “giving up on self-preservation” and toward finding an ideal that includes it without gutting the reader’s moral commitments. The editor warns that discarding self-preservation can “literally kill you.” Instead. the advice is to change the framework you live inside.
The center of that framework is a Buddhist metaphor called Indra’s net. described as “a classic Buddhist metaphor that originated in ancient India.” The editor asks readers to picture “an infinite net stretching out across the universe (a bit like a spiderweb).” At each node where the threads intersect. there’s a jewel like “a dewdrop that sits on the spiderweb.” Each jewel is “so shiny and reflective that it contains the image of every other jewel in the entire net.” The result is that each jewel reflects “the reflections of the reflections. and the reflections of those reflections. on and on forever.”.
Reality. the editor writes. is interdependence: “No jewel exists as a separate. boundaried entity.” Change one jewel. and “every jewel in the net transforms too.” The editor connects that idea directly to the reader’s fear of self-preservation feeling like betrayal: there’s no sharp distinction between “where I end and where you begin.” You don’t take care of yourself so you can better take care of someone else later—you take care of yourself because “you are inherently precious.”.
If you don’t, the editor says you “smudg[e] up one of the jewels,” and the effects ripple outward. “Yes, smudging up your jewel will change the reflections in all the other jewels,” the response says—but it’s also a local failure: “You have failed to treat one of the jewels as precious.”
To sharpen that point. the editor brings in contemporary philosopher Susan Wolf’s concept of the “moral saint. ” someone who tries to make all their actions morally good. Wolf’s argument. as the editor presents it. is that constant self-sacrifice is a bad ideal because it can erase what makes life well lived. The editor includes Wolf’s words about the cost of that mentality:.
“If the moral saint is devoting all his time to feeding the hungry or healing the sick or raising money for Oxfam. then necessarily he is not reading Victorian novels. playing the oboe. or improving his backhand. ” she writes. “A life in which none of these possible aspects of character are developed may seem to be a life strangely barren.”.
That contrast is what helps the reader’s question land, the editor says: what feels wrong about a life like that? Why does it give “ick” to Wolf—and to the editor too?
The answer offered is that people hyper-focused on giving may be refusing life’s gifts. The editor points to ordinary pleasures: “The taste of an unusually good meal.” The pleasure of movement on a dance floor. “The intimacy you feel in a late-night conversation with a friend.” Even “the specific. delicious. bright shade of green you see on the underside of leaves when the sun shines through them at four o’clock.”.
When life offers gifts, the editor argues, the gracious thing is to accept them, enjoy them, and let them make you “gleam.” If you don’t, the editor says you dull yourself—and it doesn’t improve the net. It “detracts from it.”
The editor also returns to the emotional tone the reader described. Fear and resentment while offering “charity” or “service” or “help” isn’t, the editor argues, being in right relation with others. It becomes a common form of martyrdom, setting up a hierarchy between a “giver” and a “receiver.”
The alternative is to stay horizontal: “I’m a jewel in the net, you’re a jewel in the net,” and you offer what you can “without damaging my well-being — without ripping my part of the net.”
The closing guidance is direct and personal. “Play with finding that balance,” the editor writes. “You’ll know you’ve found it when you don’t feel resentful — you just feel tightly connected to others, and gleaming.”
The piece ends with reading recommendations and small cultural notes: after reading Susanna Clarke’s novel Piranesi. the editor moved to The Wood at Midwinter. which features a “sort of moral saint named Merowdis.” The response includes a line from the book where Merowdis’s sister says. “Saints are difficult people to live with…” and continues with images of saints unable to distinguish between animals and people. or spiders and people.
On the opposite end of moral behavior. the editor points readers toward a video published in Psyche asking why people are drawn to “morally ambiguous. or even downright awful. characters. ” referencing the popularity of Inventing Anna and The Sopranos. And the editor mentions psychologist Eric Turkheimer pushing back on the idea that IQ can be understood genetically “pretty much.”.
For this reader, though, the real takeaway isn’t a new self-help phrase. It’s a different way to see what “no” might protect: not guilt, not selfishness, but a wider net that can tear when someone refuses to treat their own well-being as precious.
moral dilemmas therapy boundaries self-preservation Buddhism Indra’s net Susan Wolf moral saint interdependence US society