The Nonproductive Net

The call comes at 10:47 PM. It always does. Not 10:30, when you might still be awake watching something mindless on Netflix. Not midnight, when the urgency might feel justified. Always that specific time when you've just settled into the idea that today is finally over.

“I know it's late, but...”

You already know what follows. Another crisis that somehow requires your immediate attention. Another problem that apparently only you can solve. Another emergency that's been building for weeks but becomes your urgent priority at midnight on a Tuesday.

Your phone has become a leash. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, you're on call for everyone else's inability to handle their own lives. Your sister's marriage problems. Your colleague's project disasters. Your friend's financial decisions. Your neighbor's family drama. Each crisis presenter convinced their situation is unique, urgent, and somehow your responsibility to fix.

The mathematics are brutal. In the last month, you've spent fourteen hours listening to your sister dissect her husband's perceived failures, six hours helping your colleague prepare for a meeting he should have prepped for weeks ago, and countless texts managing other people's emotional emergencies. Meanwhile, your own project deadlines slip, your sleep suffers, and your own problems get filed under “I don’t have the energy left to deal with it today.”

What's particularly insidious is how this dynamic gets framed. “You're so good at this stuff.” “You always know what to say.” “I don't know what I'd do without you.” The compliments feel like appreciation, but they're actually job descriptions for a position you never applied for.

Here's what nobody mentions in the endless stream of gratitude: being everyone's emotional infrastructure is exhausting. It's not that you don't care about these people or their problems. It's that somewhere along the way, caring became your primary identity, and everyone else's crisis became your responsibility.

The breaking point isn't dramatic. It's not one catastrophic request that finally snaps your patience. It's the slow realization that you've become a human complaint department, and your operating hours are apparently never closed. It's noticing that conversations only flow in one direction. It's the moment you realize that your availability has become their expectation, and your boundaries have become their inconvenience.

The hardest part isn't saying no to new requests. It's recognizing that you've trained people to see you as the solution to problems they should be solving themselves. Every time you've jumped in to fix, smooth over, or manage someone else's situation, you've reinforced the idea that their problems are your responsibility.

Changing this dynamic requires something that feels almost cruel: letting people struggle with the consequences of their own choices. Not because you don't care, but because your caring was never supposed to become their crutch.

The uncomfortable truth is that some people's lives fall apart without constant external management not because they're incapable, but because they've never had to develop those muscles. Your help, however good your intentions may be, has been preventing them from building the problem solving skills they actually need.

This isn't about becoming callous or abandoning people who genuinely need support. It's about distinguishing between someone having a crisis and someone having a Tuesday that they want you to manage for them. It's about recognizing that chronic emergencies often aren't emergencies at all—they're just poor planning with good marketing.

The phone still rings at 11:47 PM sometimes. The difference now is that you've learned the most helpful thing you can say isn't always “I'll take care of it.” Sometimes it's “What do you think you should do about that?” And sometimes…it's just letting it ring.