You Cannot Be Responsible for Everyone

You can care deeply without carrying everyone else's life

A few years ago I had an employee going through a hard time, at work and in her life. I wanted her to know I had her back, so I told her she could message me anytime she needed, day or night. “I don’t sleep much anyway,” I said proudly.

Then I watched her expression slowly change to what I can only describe as disgust mixed with sadness. I immediately felt the heat rise in my face. I had expected gratitude. Instead she saw what I couldn’t: a person with no boundaries, who couldn’t stop.

She was right. Being available to everyone, all the time, was something I did for almost everyone in my life. I answered texts the second they came in. I inserted myself into family conflicts that had nothing to do with me. I took criticism from strangers online as seriously as criticism from people I loved. From the outside it looked like care. But if I’m being really honest, a deeper reason drove my behavior. Caring about everyone made me feel like a good person. But in reality, I was just stretching myself so much that there was very little left for the people in my life who mattered most. My guess is that you have some version of this too.

Now, I want to be crystal clear about something — I am not saying you should look away from the world, or that the suffering of people far away doesn’t matter. Caring about strangers is one of the better things humans do. But caring about someone and being responsible for them are not the same. And lately I fear we’ve started to treat them as if they were. We’ve decided that to care about someone is to take them on — to hold their problems as ours, to feel accountable for how they turn out.

There’s a hard limit on this. The anthropologist Robert Dunbar found that humans can maintain only about 150 stable relationships at a time. The number tracks with the size of the groups humans lived in for most of our history, and roughly with brain size across other primates. For almost all of human existence, 150 was close to everyone you would ever know. (Remember when that was about how many Facebook friends we had?) Smartphones changed this. With a screen in your pocket, now you can see everyone, all the time. But your capacity hasn’t changed.

There’s only so much attention and care in any of us. When we put our care toward the few people actually in our lives, we can do something real for them. When we try to stretch it over everyone, we’re left with almost nothing for anyone.

So, let me share an exercise I do with clients. You draw four circles inside of each other, sort of like a bull’s-eye, and sort the people in your life into them. The center is the smallest. This holds the few people you cannot imagine your life without. The next ring is wider. It’s for friends, extended family, and the people you actually talk to. Then the third circle is filled with coworkers, neighbors, acquaintances. These people you’d recognize but wouldn’t call.

Finally you add a fourth ring. This vast circle is for people you can see but will never meet: strangers, influencers, the lives unfolding on your phone at midnight. These are real people who matter (unless they’re bots — it’s hard to tell these days), but you can’t be responsible for them.

The exercise encourages you to get honest about what each ring can hold and what your capacity actually looks like (not what you wish it could be). The people at the center obviously get the most from you. And, critically, their well-being is so important to you that it is partly yours to steward. The outer ring can get your attention, sometimes your money, sometimes your voice, but their well-being is not your individual responsibility.

It’s easy for me to fall back into old patterns. But I don’t obsessively refresh Slack or dig deep into my comment sections anymore. I would rather save my time and energy for the people in my life who matter most.