How Do You Balance Responsibilities To Yourself/Your Kin & Your Wider Community?

Asking Big Questions week here at Culture Study

This is the second Big Question thread this week — you can find the first, on How to Know When to Quit, here.

Today’s Big Question comes from Culture Study Reader Laura, who asks:

How do you balance your responsibilities to yourself and your immediate kin with responsibilities to your wider community, society, and the planet?

I want to hear how people make decisions from the big ones to the small ones. Things like sending kids to private vs. public schools, choosing a career that has a positive impact on the world vs. one that offers you the salary and work-life balance you need, balancing the need to get things quickly with the environmental harm of getting everything delivered, etc.

I realize that these are more complex decisions than how I've outlined them, and I want to know how people thing about these challenges — and importantly, what feelings come up as a result of these decisions and how to manage them.

A *lot* of people wanted to grapple this one, so let’s go for it. You can talk about your own experience, how you’ve seen others successfully or less successfully grapple with divide, or ask questions about areas of your life where you feel like you’re *not* figuring out the balance well.

Just remember that, as always, this is a private, subscriber-only space; the rest of the internet is currently filled with even more assholery than usual but we can try and be decent to one another here.