For the last two months, I been putting up an old friend from a punk house since I moved into my house and couldn’t leave out my lease. This friend has a lot of energy and motivation issues, and generally needs a lot of support. Beyond putting him up, I helped him leave out the punk house we used to live in that was getting evicted, got him a storage unit, and have helped out with about an errand a week.
I asked him if he would help me clean out the apartment since I had been putting him up and he basically shrugged me off. On top of that, now he’s trying to change the timeline for getting out, but I need to do it this weekend when I am off work otherwise it will never get done. He knows this and we discussed it weeks ago.
Thankfully, some friends have agreed to put him up for a week as an ‘off ramp’ but it still feels like I am evicting him sort of.
I feel shitty because he don’t have a real place to go in the city. At the same time, I have done as much as I can with the energy and time I have available. It also feels shitty that we would probably be better friends right now if I had just left him on the street.
Some help sensemaking is appreciated right now.
One difficult thing I’ve had to learn is that you really need to probe for people’s committedness/alignment. There are billions of needy cases in the world, and if you don’t carefully pick and choose, a steady stream of them that you come across will deplete you of resources and energy, and then you’ll have had time gone by with nothing to show for it. Merely pitching in for people, instead of having a clear framework for how they can get in charge of their lives, will only exhaust you. You can orient yourself towards being detachable from most of the capitalist nexus with the ability to onboard committed people to do the same, or you can be a charity, taking care of people’s daily and monthly needs.
In the past 4 years I’ve lent out almost $10k, and covered another $6k in rent for friends that I invited to live with me to save them from being homeless. I’m optimistically going to get maybe a quarter of all that back over the next 2-3 years. It probably would have made everyone better off if I wrote out a contract, obliging people to make a budget and follow it: if I can live on $400 a month, they should be able to live on $800 a month.
Specifically, I wonder whether I would have been able to make a down payment on a house with all that money, and then be able to more cheaply and easily and permanently harbor even more people. Everything you spend playing defense is something you can’t spend playing offense.
In terms of energy and motivation, it takes a leap to get to a self-supporting position, but it’s super easy to do something if another person is literally volunteering to do all the executive function for you. If someone can’t even tack on to something happening right in front of them that they’re invited to, they’re only going to be dead weight for the foreseeable future. I’ve been the one in the position of being broke and crashing with friends for extended periods before I finally got over myself and accepted the mediocre jobs that were in arm’s reach, but I at least did a couple chores here and there. I guess you either learn something from the experience or you don’t.
Thank you for taking the time and energy to write this out. Up until this point I have been pretty good about keeping the systemic line in mind. Which is to say, understanding that his position is the result of societal failing of needy people, and that I cannot create the degree of support he needs out of whole cloth by myself.
When I wrote my post, I was stuck in anxiety and the individualist/atomized line of ‘I have a personal responsibility to do everything in my power for this person’.
In particular thank you for this thought: “Everything you spend playing defense is something you can’t spend playing offense.”
I often motivate myself with the reminder “I was not born to play defense”.
There’s a lot of “what ifs” that can be thrown out to make sense of these situations and they’re rarely as simple to fix as they seem on the surface. Supporting others is admirable and we should engage in supporting our communities where and when we can, but no one individual is an infinite well of resources…money, energy, time…at the end of the day, you also need to care for yourself! If you don’t place boundaries, you will become overwhelmed, leaving not only one person in need of help, but potentially two.
I have done as much as I can with the energy and time I have available.
It’s as simple as this and you shouldn’t beat yourself up over it. Your friend has things going on that you cannot fix and it’s not reasonable for you and you alone to support the weight of both of your lives in the long-term. This setup is unsustainable, not a personal failure.
Clearer boundaries should have been set to begin with, but you also set an expectation for when he would move out and if you don’t hold fast to this, any boundaries or expectations you have set will be pushed as you’ve shown you were not serious about what you said. Holding fast to these is sticking up for yourself, not being a asshole, particularly if you’ve had these conversations and he agreed to them. Again, I don’t really know all the details, so I’m assuming you are past the point of being flexible with his needs and your ability to provide support.
It’s good that you’ve brought in some others to help, because numbers help make all of this easier. Beyond that, perhaps some sort of professional like a therapist, if accessible, would be something to try to help set him up with. You cannot fix the work alone.
Not an asshole comrade, I had a friend of mine we put up for two years finally move out. Bit of a different situation though, he helped chip in/occasionally helped with chores but the problem really was that rent and living around here is just insane. Only reason he was able to get out was because he found two other people who happened to be moving out at the same time; sheer luck, honestly.
Most craigslist/other listing sites didn’t really have a…decent selection of room-mates and it’s better to take that risk with people you know if you can.
More and more people I know have the same issues with motivation and energy. I do from time to time; working at a simple job that pays decent for now despite being able to “apply” myself and get a better job, but I don’t want the additional responsibilities for like…three or four extra bucks an hour.
You just only have so much to give and time doesn’t work for any of us.
