The Boundaries We Choose

Angel was bright, in all the ways a person could be bright. She was clever and whip smart. Her smile and laugh were both infectious, she lit up every room in a way that makes that cliché ring true.

But she lived under a shadow. An absent mother. A father who beat, molested, and gaslit her. And a twin brother breaking down under the same regime.

Making it to adulthood with her light intact was not merely surviving. It was heroic, forged from the will to not be broken and the strength to carry her brother through the depths of darkness.

At 17 her father died. From the grave he was no longer a threat. Angel graduated from high school, started a career, and found love. A happy ending to a story of good persevering under attack by evil, and…

Oh wait, an aneurysm ended her life as she drove home from work.

Angel is dead at 19, leaving behind a devastated fiancé and church overflowing with mourners.

And a brother who can’t make sense of the story.

A quarter century later, I still haven’t made sense of it.

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Humans are story telling creatures. From the earliest grunts around fires in the Great Rift Valley to the latest musician biopic, we take events that lack connectivity and assign them meaning.

Living only with what happens to who and when is a terrifying place to be. Adding a why and a how brings us comfort.

The key here is that we create the story. The universe does not run on narrative causality. In the days after Angel’s death, so many people told me “everything happens for a reason”, as if that was comforting.

I looked for the reason. I found none. Through years of observation, rumination, and introspection I have come to the understanding that the narratives that knit our human world together are wholly human made.

Everyone is the hero of their own story.

That boss who asks too much and pays too little?

A villain to be overcome.

The barista we see each morning on the way to work?

An NPC there for a purpose, provide the coffee we need to keep on fighting.

The homeless person we drive past?

Set dressing to illustrate the stakes.

The world reduced to a story simple enough for us to fall asleep at night.

But the roles we envision for ourselves, the parts we cast others in, these are not part of some natural order. They are as artificial as the plastic succulents on your desk in the office. Pleasant illusions, until you poke them.

Chosen. Molded. Placed. By us.

The universe? Indifferent to our scripts.

When Stories Become Boundaries

You might now be thinking, “Ok, ok, I get it. Nothing matters and nihilism reigns, so what’s the point?”

The point isn’t nihilism, though I see the appeal. The point is the power of these stories to shape our reality, and how we exist within it. The boss is a bad guy, so it’s fine to keep on driving when I see him on the side of the road changing his flat tire in the rain. If I manage it, I may be able to even drench him with a huge splash of water as I go by. A small win for me, the hero.

When the barista I am used to seeing daily suddenly is gone, let go a few days after I heard them utter the word “union”, well it’s not my problem. Another one slots into place.

When the homeless are swept up by law enforcement to be taken to who knows where? Well, that’s fine, I didn’t like seeing them on my daily commute, and surely anywhere else was better than where they were.

Those stories we tell, they do more than make sense of the world. They create boundaries between who matters, and who doesn’t. One side is me, and the other is them. One side is important, worth caring about, the other is background I can ignore.

The Extensions of Self

“Wait a minute, I don’t only care about myself!” you might now be thinking, indignantly. “I love my family. I enlisted and fought for my country. I actively volunteer in my community!”

My family

My country

My community

These are the extensions of what we understand to be ourselves. They define the borders of what our stories tell us about who matters.

And who doesn’t.

We all make these distinctions to one degree or another. Building narratives is embedded in all human cultures; assigning familiar roles is just a piece of that. The issue is that the border where we decide the self ends and the other begins is the place where moral decisions are made.

You take precautions to protect yourself from harm. You provide for your family to make sure they are whole and healthy. You are outraged by injustice done against your people.

But when a hospital a hundred miles away is closed because it lost funding? Not your problem, you don’t live there. When a trans woman loses her job for being trans and has no legal recourse? Thankfully you’re “normal” and that will never happen to you.

When we ignore the harming of people because they exist beyond a boundary that we have drawn, it doesn’t diminish the harm. It just helps us ignore it. And that ignorance is where evil thrives.

It is an evil of indifference. Sure, you aren’t closing the hospital. You didn’t fire the trans woman.

Besides, what can you even do about those things? You need the boundaries you have, no one can care about everyone, and no one person can affect these things.

One drop of water has nearly no impact. But enough water brought together and moving in the same direction can carve a mountain into a canyon. When a large enough group of people cares enough it creates a flood that changes the landscape.

When we see ourselves as not the solitary protagonist in our own tale, but a part of the ensemble that is humanity, it changes the placement of moral boundaries. We are all subject to the random cruelties of fate; it is only as thinking, choosing, and acting for the good of all that we mitigate the worst of what is beyond our control.

Why Boundaries Feel Necessary

Plenty of people understand and are aware of these boundaries. But they may not agree that boundaries are a problem but instead see them as necessary. Boundaries add definition to a world that can be chaotic.

We use things like hierarchies to define where we belong, and what is owed to those above, below, and beside us. A Father as Head of the Family defines what he owes to that family, and what in return they owe to him. The boundaries between the wealthy and the poor force our choices to have consequences. If life is a zero-sum game we can’t all be winners.

This can be seen not as “othering” people, but as ordered responsibility. Not having clear boundaries risks diffusing our responsibilities to all of humanity, and in the process diluting each of our responsibilities so much as to be meaningless. People not adhering to their role, staying in their lane, respecting the boundaries, that just introduces even more anarchy to the world.

This worldview is compelling for understandable reasons. Tight-knit groups, family, neighborhood, nation, that buffer life’s storms. In a chaotic world, these groups feel like home fires, warm and contained. Hierarchies aren’t merely control structures; they’re organizational lifelines that let people protect what’s close without being overwhelmed. They’ve steadied tribes, villages, and nations for millennia, turning raw survival into something shared and sustainable. The appeal is obvious.

The Cost of Mutual Exclusion

I’m not asking for the abandoning of hierarchy. Hierarchies have steadied groups since forever. The question isn’t whether hierarchies serve functions because they clearly do. The question is whether those functions require us to treat people outside our circles as less than human.

I’m asking: “What if we all exclude?”

Flip it. What if you’re excluded? We see it daily.

When everyone draws boundaries to exclude, you don’t get a world of protected circles. You get a world where everyone is vulnerable to someone else’s exclusion. Your boundary protects you from them, but their boundary can just as easily cast you out.

People unable to get healthcare because they exist outside the boundary of “people with jobs”.

People being shot because their beliefs are outside the boundary of “people who all agree with the same politics”.

People being denied rights because they exist outside the boundary of “people who adhere to ‘traditional’ gender roles”.

That world is definitionally an “us” that matters and a “them” that matters less.

Or not at all.

A frame that is inherently antagonistic.

The Wager

These boundaries blind us to the interconnectedness that defies our narratives. The boss who is against you? If you both succeed you both can prosper. The unionizing barista helps get workplace benefits enshrined in law that also improve your life. Creating access to housing and the basics of life reduces the deprivation and desperation that drive the use of drugs and create a climate for crime.

Chosen borders, not fate. Expanding them costs: Time. Effort. Energy. Maybe wallet.

That’s the wager.

We can keep believing in the stories we tell, keep believing in a natural order that doesn’t exist, and keep the world as it is. One where we scrape and scramble to get what we can for ourselves, whether as individuals, families, religions, cultures, or nations, and hope to avoid the suffering endured by those outside our circle.

Or we can look beyond those boundaries and see others not as incidental characters on our hero’s journey, but people like us. People needing love and safety, people who are inheritors of a vast amalgamation of the accomplishments of our forbearers. Care about them all as much as our capacity allows, knowing there is a cost.

If the first option wins, if narrow boundaries truly serve us better, if human nature really does require hierarchical exclusion to function? In that case we gain, well, probably nothing. A few will continue to thrive, but many will continue to suffer.

And what if we lose? We will keep fighting for our own lest we fall into the suffering of them. Effort and resources wasted on walls and wars instead of bridges and buildings. We go on looking past harm and allowing it to flourish in our indifference.

If we bet on the second option, seeing us all together? The potential gain there is a world of abundance, raising the floor on what it means to live as a human. Does it create a utopia? No, the world isn’t perfect.

But when boundaries expand, the cost of exclusion becomes clear. The brilliant mind denied education, the innovation lost to artificial scarcity, the resources spent on enforcement rather than creation. Wide boundaries don’t guarantee abundance, but they remove the structural barriers that create artificial scarcity. When more people can contribute and benefit, the floor rises for everyone.

And if betting on doing good for all loses? If it turns out that expanding boundaries was misguided, that human cooperation can’t scale beyond small groups? We will still have made things better for many people. At a cost, for sure, but it’s still a better world.

I still can’t explain why Angel died. The universe doesn’t owe me that explanation, and I certainly don’t expect it to give me one. But I can choose what kind of world to build in a universe that doesn’t honor our stories.

The boundaries are chosen. We can choose boundaries that protect small circles at the cost of mutual antagonism, or boundaries that expand to include more people in the circle of moral concern. Both are coherent. But only one creates the conditions for widespread flourishing.

That’s not idealism. That’s just better architecture.

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