Community Tuesdays: The F#$%s We're No Longer Giving
Because suffering is inevitable, but your burnout doesn't have to be
"There's no pot of time at the end of the rainbow. You are going to need to do something to make the time. You are going to have to ruthlessly prioritize it and viciously defend it and you're going to have to explain one hundred times to the people in your life that you need it." — Leslie Forde, founder, Mom's Hierarchy Of Needs (via Neha Ruch)
This week, we’re debuting the first monthly F#$s We're No Longer Giving thread.
Why? Because one conversation I’m constantly hearing in my life as a caregiver is this one:
I love caring for people. I love the work that I do, whether it’s paid or unpaid.
But there’s just. Too. Much. Of. It. And something has to give.
This week, we’re going to decide, in advance, what that “something” is. Before that something becomes us.
If you’re already ready to jump into the chat, you can do so here:
If you’re not sure how you’ll answer yet, keep reading, and we can talk this one out. Because I know this one can be hard. Which is why we’re going to do it together.
Below are some examples of scenarios I hear about often in this community, which we can unpack a bit more below:
You’re really good at your job, but that work doesn’t leave enough time and energy left over for playing with your kids, or being present with yourself. (This was me as a classroom teacher, even with some of the most incredible bosses of all time.)
You love parenting, but you don’t have access to sufficient childcare, so you never get a break. And it’s burning you out. (This was me, in the early days of this newsletter, when I could no longer juggle full-time paid work alongside parenting a preschooler who couldn’t tolerate full-day care, for a host of complicated reasons.)
Between the demands of paid work and caregiving, you don’t have enough time to spend with your friends or larger community, so you feel lonely, even though you know that someone who cares about you is just a phone call away.
Or, you’re spending so much time holding space for your friends and/or family members that you can’t see how you’ll ever have enough space in your life for paid work.
And maybe, just maybe, you’re living under the fall of an empire that has created many of these conditions of scarcity, and does not look to be providing solutions for them anytime soon. Just something to consider in your (nonexistent) spare time.
So what’s a tired caregiver to do?
Give. Less. F#$%s.
Obviously, you’re thinking. This is not groundbreaking information. But how?
Why is it easier to give less f#$%s in community, rather than going it alone?
Because no one person has all of the answers right now—about the best way to work, the best way to parent, any of it. The economic landscape has changed so many times in the last twenty years – the 2008 recession, the 2009 invention of the iphone, the 2020 pandemic, and now, the rise of AI – that it is impossible to follow any guidance offered by previous generations in terms of how we approach work. And as many writers in recent years have pointed out, from
(The Power Pause) to (Make Men Emotional Again), there’s really no such thing as a “traditional” style of caregiving in the West either. Even the stay-at-home parent is a relatively recent invention. We’re all just winging it at this point.Because our culture doesn’t have one good answer for us, we’re often looking to each other for guidance. Unfortunately, I also often see this looking-out devolving into looking-down-on. Social media has made this worse, but it didn’t invent caregiver-on-caregiver snark. My own mother considered one particular homeowner on our block her personal nemesis, because her porch and yard was always immaculately decorated for the holidays: “Oh, look at what Martha Stewart’s done now!” In that season, she was a solo parent who didn’t have time to do it all, while “Martha” clearly did.
I don’t judge my mom for channeling her grief into humor, especially since “Martha” remained unaware of my mom’s wrathful feelings about her tasteful door wreaths for the fifteen years they were neighbors. But those years also led me to wonder: what if this constant looking-out we’re all doing could also involve, well, actually looking out for each other?
What if it involved us all deciding, collectively, that we’re no longer going to give a f@#$ about the same things? It would be easier than trying to do this alone. Or to keep trying to do it all, and burning out.
“But wait,” I hear you saying. “If the world is on fire, shouldn’t we be giving more f#$%s, not less?”
We’re not saying you have to stop caring about everything. We’re saying you need to have what calls a F#$% Budget. As she puts it:
Being concerned about your own self-interest does not necessarily exclude you from ALSO being generous, caring, attentive, and empathetic toward others. In fact, it might be what enables those qualities.
In an aptly titled post called “Good Selfish vs. Bad Selfish,” the author of the equally aptly titled
points out that there’s a difference between (a) getting a good night’s rest so you can show up for your family, and (b) passing out on the couch all day and ignoring them. Putting on your own oxygen mask doesn’t mean you’re stealing one from someone else — it means you’re not creating an unnecessary crisis that requires someone else to carry you off the plane.Moreover, now is the time to practice Good Selfishness— while we still have some semblance of a social safety net to help us carry the weight of those in our care. With education and Medicare budgets come under threat, I’m already seeing far too many caregivers being asked to make their to-do lists longer and make themselves smaller, in order to patch up the holes that some deeply-confused leaders are creating in this net. If this trend continues unabated, many caregivers will collapse, which serves no one. And far too many will then blame themselves for that, instead of our broken system.
Resistance in this moment looks like saying, “No. No thank you. I will not be collapsing today.”
And yes, this may potentially shake up the status quo. But as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said in “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the biggest obstacle to positive change is not just the obvious bogeymen of each historical moment, such as the Ku Klux Klan. It is the perennially milquetoast moderate “who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”
I’ll order the justice, please. Even if it comes with a side of temporary discomfort.
So, how might this look, this saying of no?
Here are some ideas.
Perhaps this is the month during which you vow to read up on nonviolent communication, and communicate to your clients that you are no longer going to “just give this Powerpoint a quick look” for free.
Perhaps this is the month in which you Google “yellow rocking” and use the scripts you find along those lines to let your narcissistic ex know that you will be sticking to the custody agreement rather than switching weekends—again. “I’ve got plans, but I’m wishing you the best with figuring out how to attend that online poker tournament/crypto conference/’company offsite’ with your secretary in Bali!”
Perhaps this is the month in which you forward your prodigal uncle or cousin or sibling some examples of how to care for elders as a community from
, where is doing essential work on this. And then you inform them that you are more than happy to watch over your loved one with Alzheimer’s this weekend, but not every weekend.Perhaps this is the month in which you sign your spouse up for a paid subscription to
newsletter, and use it to frame a tense but long-overdue reminder that your time and rest and dreams matter too, so you need nights and weekends off from care work — even unpaid care work — like anyone else.
But what if someone gets mad at me?
Look, I’m a nonviolent Buddhist. I don’t love conflict. But it’s a misconception that nonviolent Buddhists never make anyone mad, or if they do, they’re bad Buddhists. The view in my tradition is that everyone has some level of ego, everyone wants to be happy and free of suffering, and when two parties come together and their egos clash over how their needs can be met, some tension can be expected. This is known in the group psychology world as the “forming, storming and norming” process, and it’s perfectly healthy. It’s also the kind of suffering you can’t escape, in this life. May as well accept it with grace.
In my experience, accepting conflict with grace is hard not because it is inherently “bad,” but because many of us learned when we were younger that silencing ourselves within conflict was synonymous with “being good.” Or we learned that it was synonymous with safety — a way of avoiding being attacked, or a way of keeping things moving during times of great difficulty, within a dysfunctional family system.
People-pleasing, or “fawning,” can even be an involuntary trauma response, not a conscious choice. We might soften this reactivity over time with mindfulness, but we may not be able to turn it off entirely. Sometimes we may need extensive therapeutic or somatic support and not just “healthy boundaries” in order to shift the way we operate. (I really love Setting Boundaries That Stick, by trauma specialist Juliane Taylor Shore, if this sounds like you.)
In any case, there’s no need to beat ourselves up if this kind of reactivity was handed down to us as part of our childhood conditioning. We didn’t choose it. I am just here to say very gently to you as an adult that this conditioning is not going to serve you in the seasons of change to come.
At the same time, there may be times when, despite all of the meditation and therapy and training in the world, you still may not have the freedom or energy to say “no” to everything that is being asked of you.
This is why we have this thread for you – because it’s okay to pick your battles.
You’re just going to name ONE f@#$ you are not going to give this month in this chat thread. Not all of them.
So maybe you don’t start by saying no to your biggest paying client, but you do tell your ex that you’re going to stick to the custody agreement. Or you do neither thing, but you make a deal with yourself that the dishes can get done tomorrow, or the next day, or whenever you’ve got your next kid-free moment, because perfection is not a habit you can afford in this season.
And then, you share that deal with us, so that we can say: me too. Me too. Me too.
Sound good? Good. I can’t wait to see how this goes.
"Putting on your own oxygen mask doesn’t mean you’re stealing one from someone else — it means you’re not creating an unnecessary crisis that requires someone else to carry you off the plane."
I really love these ideas, Ryan! And the way you acknowledge how hard this can be for anyone who was raised to think they should just go with the flow and not cause trouble, even good trouble.