You don’t need better boundaries. You need a better framework.

Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:

I’m the only child of divorced parents. Both of my parents require different levels of help. One is incredibly poor and trying to take care of my grandparents. The other does not have computer literacy and English isn’t their main language. I help with my attention, money, and time whenever I can, because at the end of the day, we’re all we got. 

This desire to help has bled into other portions of my life. One of my best friends went through a personal crisis and had to move out the same day, and I packed everything. During the very beginning of Covid, I drove to the ER in a rental car to help a different friend. There’s a migrant mother on my corner who I pass every day, who knows that I will give whatever I can. She’s called me during work, and every time I think she’s about to get deported, but she’s just calling me to ask for groceries. 

Of course, this is all at a cost to myself. 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!

But the problem is that I don’t want to say no, and when I do, it’s because I know if I say yes, I will fall down a slippery slope of absorbing more responsibility that isn’t mine to hold. That feels like an insufficient reason to not help others — something I believe is important to do. Not for any particular moral/religious reason or because I worry that I’m a bad person. Frankly, I don’t give a damn about that. But I do care about the well-being of those in my orbit immensely. 

My fear is that I know that I will give, give, give until I’m nothing. Any act of self-preservation feels like a slight at my own ideals, but resentment bubbles away anyhow because I’m so overextended. 

Dear Beyond Boundaries,

You’ve worked hard in therapy (yay!) and have learned to say that magic word (“no”). Yet you’re not convinced in your bones that you should want to set boundaries. And I actually think you’re picking up on something real there.

To be clear, I think self-preservation is every bit as important as self-sacrifice — especially for people like me and (by the sounds of it) you, who grew up as “parentified” children focused on taking care of others’ needs. 

But I think the popular language of “boundaries” isn’t quite passing the sniff test for you — and for good reason. We’re taught that “a boundary is a limit or edge that defines you as separate from others” — it’s “where I end and where you begin,” to quote a couple of popular therapists. Yet if you believe, as I do, that we’re all actually profoundly interconnected and interdependent, that we’re constantly influencing and shaping reality for one another, then that idea of boundaries may feel like it muddies more than it clarifies. Is it really possible to draw a sharp line between ourselves and other people?

Pop psychology further assures us that although boundaries might feel selfish, they’re really the opposite: The more you protect your own well-being today, the more you’ll be able to help others tomorrow! But this is weirdly instrumentalizing: It treats you as a means to an end, not an end in yourself. It makes it sound like your actions are only justifiable if their ultimate aim is to serve others’ needs — exactly the sort of “self-sacrifice is all that matters” mentality that boundaries are meant to get you away from. 

To make matters worse, some people bastardize the concept of boundaries by brandishing boundary language as a cover for avoidance. We’ve all got that friend (or Instagram influencer) who says, “Nope, I’m drawing a boundary!” anytime they’re being asked to do something that would be even a little hard or uncomfortable. 

You write that any act of self-preservation feels like a slight at your own ideals. The answer is not to just give up on self-preservation — that approach can literally kill you. Instead, you need an ideal that both honors the importance of self-preservation and offers you a moral vision you can actually believe in. 

So allow me to present Indra’s net, a classic Buddhist metaphor that originated in ancient India.

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 (a bit like a dewdrop that sits on the spiderweb). And each jewel is so shiny and reflective that it contains the image of every other jewel in the entire net. Which means each jewel also contains the reflections of the reflections, and the reflections of those reflections, on and on forever.

This is reality, the Buddhists say. No jewel exists as a separate, boundaried entity: Change one jewel, and every jewel in the net transforms too, because they’re all reflecting each other. Change one person, and every person changes too.

The idea that everything is constantly remaking everything else is what Buddhist philosophers call “dependent co-arising” or “interdependent origination” or sometimes “interbeing,” but honestly, you don’t need any fancy terminology to understand it. If you’ve ever walked outside early in the morning and seen a spiderweb covered with dew drops, with each dew drop reflecting everything else around it, you get the basic idea.   

I think picturing yourself as part of this web might really help you. If you see yourself as one of the jewels in the net, you immediately realize a couple things. First, there is no sharp distinction marking off “where I end and where you begin.” And you don’t take care of yourself today so that you can better take care of me tomorrow. You take care of yourself because you are one of the jewels in the net — you are inherently precious! And if you mess up your own well-being, you are smudging up one of the jewels, or worse, creating a rip in the net! 

Yes, smudging up your jewel will change the reflections in all the other jewels, so it’s a problem on the level of how you affect others. But it’s also just a problem on the local level: You have failed to treat one of the jewels as precious. You’ve caused a rip. That is not morally praiseworthy. 

I’ve written before about contemporary philosopher Susan Wolf’s concept of the “moral saint” — someone who tries to make all their actions as morally good as possible. Wolf argues that this is actually a bad ideal, because if you’re doing constant self-sacrifice, you end up living a life bereft of the personal projects, relationships, and experiences that make up a life well lived. 

“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.”

It’s clear that Wolf finds this sort of life distasteful. But your question prompted me to ask myself: What is it, exactly, that makes it so distasteful? Why does it actually give Wolf — and me — the ick? 

I would argue it’s because someone who is hyper-focused on giving to others is refusing some of the great gifts of life. Life is constantly offering us gifts. The taste of an unusually good meal. The pleasure of feeling your body move on the dance floor. The intimacy you feel in a late-night conversation with a friend. 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 someone offers you a gift — as life is offering you just by giving you a healthy body and mind and a beautiful planet — the gracious thing to do is accept it and enjoy it. 

And when I picture the jewels in Indra’s net, I imagine that it’s basking in the light of all these gifts, that makes the jewels really gleam. If you don’t let yourself experience and savor all these things and feel well and happy and fulfilled, I suspect you are dulling yourself. That does not improve the net. It detracts from it. 

Of course, caring for the well-being of others can itself be extremely gratifying. But the problem creeps in when you let that crowd out everything else, ultimately tarnishing your own well-being. The language you use to describe your current state — “my fear is that I know that I will give, give, give until I’m nothing” and “resentment bubbles away anyhow because I’m so overextended” — tells me you’re putting too much of your energy into caring for others and not enough into caring for yourself.

Feeling fear and resentment while offering “charity” or “service” or “help” to others is not actually being in right relation with others — it’s an all-too-common form of martyrdom that sets up a hierarchical dynamic between a long-suffering “giver” and a passive “receiver.” The alternative is to stay horizontal, to think “I’m a jewel in the net, you’re a jewel in the net, and I’ll offer whatever I can offer without damaging my well-being — without ripping my part of the net.”

So, dear reader, play with finding that balance. You’ll know you’ve found it when you don’t feel resentful — you just feel tightly connected to others, and gleaming.

Bonus: What I’m reading

• After reading Susanna Clarke’s unbelievable novel Piranesi, I recently read her much shorter book The Wood at Midwinter, which is about a sort of moral saint named Merowdis. Her sister tells her, “Saints are difficult people to live with…You have visions. You can’t see any difference between animals and people. You can’t see any difference between spiders and people…no one has any idea what you’re talking about.”

• On the opposite end of the moral spectrum, a video published in Psyche interrogates a fascinating question: Why are we so drawn to morally ambiguous, or even downright awful, characters? (Think of the popularity of Inventing Anna or The Sopranos.) Turns out there’s something psychologically very juicy about moral extremes… 

• Intelligence is a lot more complicated than some intelligent people believe it to be. Psychologist Eric Turkheimer recently pushed back on the idea that we can pretty much understand IQ genetically.