There's an idea we've been trained to try to often avoid: inconvenience. We optimize our lives to avoid it. We streamline our mornings, automate our errands, curate our social lives to minimize friction. And in many ways, this makes sense—why suffer unnecessarily?
But I've been thinking lately about a specific kind of inconvenience that we've maybe been too quick to engineer out of our lives: the kind where you set aside what you want, what you need, what you had planned, and do something purely for someone else.
I want to be precise here, because this isn't about compromise. Compromise is a negotiation. I give a little, you give a little, we meet somewhere in the middle. What I'm describing is different. It's genuinely placing the needs of another person above your own. Not because you were asked to. Not because you'll get something in return. But because someone you love, or even someone you barely know, needed something, and you chose to be the one who showed up.
I find that inconveniencing yourself for others is becoming a lost art, and we are losing important values in society because of it.
We live in an era that celebrates the self with almost religious fervor. Self-care. Self-optimization. Self-education. We go to the gym to build better versions of ourselves. We curate our diets, our routines, our personal brands. There are entire industries built around the premise that you are the most important project you'll ever work on. And I don't think any of these things are inherently wrong—taking care of yourself matters. But somewhere along the way, the pendulum swung so far inward that we forgot how to swing it back out.
The cultural script now goes something like this: protect your peace, set your boundaries, prioritize your goals, stay on your timeline. And again, none of that is bad advice in isolation. But when it becomes the default lens through which we see every interaction, every relationship, every request for help, something essential gets lost. We start treating every demand on our time as a threat rather than an invitation. We start asking "what do I get out of this?" before we ask "what does this person need?"
I think about the concept of the village; not in a nostalgic, romanticized way, but in a structural one. For most of human history, people lived in webs of mutual obligation. You watched your neighbor's children not because it was convenient but because that's what people did. You brought food to the grieving family down the road. You showed up. The expectation wasn't that every act of generosity would be immediately reciprocated. The expectation was that you were part of something larger than yourself, and that meant sometimes your afternoon, your plans, your comfort came second.
We've largely dismantled that structure. We live in cities full of strangers. We move for jobs, for school, for opportunity. Our communities are increasingly opt-in, and our relationships are increasingly transactional, even if we don't like to admit it. The result is a kind of freedom, yes, but also a kind of poverty. We are free to focus entirely on ourselves, and many of us do, and many of us are lonelier than ever.
There is real value, not just moral value, but personal, existential value, in inconveniencing yourself for other people.
Not because it makes you a good person, though it might. Not because it'll come back around, though it often does. But because it's one of the few things that can pull you out of the relentless orbit of your own life and remind you that you exist in relation to other people. That your time is not only yours. That the measure of a life is not how efficiently you spent it on yourself.
I worry that we are raising and becoming a generation that knows how to set boundaries but has forgotten how to cross them for someone else. That knows how to say no but has lost the instinct to say yes when it costs something. The most meaningful things I've done in my life were not convenient. They interrupted my plans. They cost me sleep, money, time I "didn't have." And I would do every single one of them again.
Inconvenience yourself. Not always, not to the point of self-destruction, but more than you think you should. The world doesn't need more people who are optimized. It needs more people who are willing to be interrupted.