Words by Haylee Hackenberg // photo by John Cameron
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a white woman asking for advice in 2026, will, at every possible junction, be urged to “let them”.
Husband getting you down? Let him. Family being difficult again? Let them. Your boss is exploitative, your friend is distant, your neighbour is weird, the world is on fire? Let them, let them, let them. Protect your peace, Queen.
We are truly in the darkest age of post-psychological-speak understanding.
The thing is, though, that’s not how community works. Community means showing up when you don’t feel like it. It means having conversations you’d rather avoid. It means occasionally sacrificing your precious, curated “peace” to remain a human being among other human beings.
Of course, boundaries are important and sometimes necessary. In fact, like all good grifts, sorry, movements, the “Let Them” theory has a decent core idea: don’t let the small things consume your entire nervous system. It’s like “don’t let the bastards get you down,” for public transport. Aside from its dubious beginnings in allegedly ripping off an original poem by Cassie Phillips, as the movement gained traction (and as the face of the movement gained billions), it has mutated into something else entirely. Again and again, I see “let them” offered as a complete response to a partner being shitty, a friend going M.I.A, or a neighbour acting a bit dodgy.
I get the appeal. But we all know that’s not how it works. Vulnerability creates intimacy. Repair creates trust. You should talk to your partner if they are treating you badly. You should check in with your friend if they’ve gone quiet. Heck, take a meal to your neighbour if you hear her crying over the fence.
You cannot be part of a community and only ever receive care. That’s not community, that’s a subscription service. What we are being sold, increasingly, is a vision of life where the highest moral good is personal emotional convenience. Where any friction is “a violation”, and any request for care is “someone else’s problem”. Where the acceptable response to witnessing the world’s horrors is not curiosity or concern, but well-practised disengagement. This is not wisdom. This is just detachment with better branding. And it is lonely.
I recently spoke to Evelyn Araluen, who talked about reframing caring for others as self-care. Caring for people isn’t an optional extra to a “real” life, something you do once you’ve finished the important stuff. It is the important stuff. It’s how we make sense of being here at all, how we stay connected to each other, and how we don’t completely lose ourselves in the process.
We are outsourcing everything: therapy, friendship, conflict, reflection, even basic conversation. We are asking AI to draft our apologies, rewrite our feelings, and summarise our relationships. (Yes, there’s a much bigger conversation to be had about access to mental health care, and yes, some people genuinely need scaffolding to communicate).
We are losing our tolerance for complexity. We are losing our patience for repair. We are losing the muscle memory of staying when something is awkward but important. And with it, we are losing empathy. Death by a thousand “let thems”. If we keep ‘letting them”, eventually there is no one left who shows up. No one left who asks the second question. No one left who notices, or brings soup, or says, “Hey, that thing you did hurt me, can we talk about it?” A society where everyone is perfectly boundaried and nobody is meaningfully involved is not a healthy society. It’s just a very lonely one with excellent jargon. Sometimes the work is not letting them. Sometimes the work is leaning in. Sometimes the work is caring when it would be easier, trendier, and more profitable not to. And sometimes, protecting your peace is just another way of saying: I don’t want to be changed by loving other people.
Which is, of course, the entire point. Reject convenience. Embrace the friction. I promise it’s worth it.
