The work you care about needs boundaries that make caring possible next month.

Caring about something makes every limit feel like a betrayal of it. There is always more to be done, and the person who cares most is the one least able to argue for stopping. What follows is not usually a dramatic collapse but a slow flattening, where the work continues and the feeling for it does not.

Choose one boundary this week and hold it exactly once: an hour that is not work, a message you answer tomorrow, a request you decline. Treat it as maintenance of the thing you care about rather than a retreat from it.