FOCUS ON WHAT DEPENDS ON YOU: COURAGE OR DISGUISED FLIGHT?

There is a tension that runs through every mature relational life and is rarely named with the precision it deserves: the moving, unstable, constantly renegotiated line between making one’s own life and participating in the life of the other. It is not a matter of choosing between being selfish or generous, between taking care of oneself or taking care of the other—that is a false dichotomy that drastically impoverishes the complexity of what it means to live among humans. What is really at stake is something far more subtle and infinitely more difficult: how to inhabit simultaneously the radical responsibility for one’s own existence and the recognition that no existence is built in isolation.
When someone says “focus on what depends on you,” there are at least three possible interpretations of that sentence, and each one points to a completely different way of being in the world.
The first is the narcissistic interpretation—the one that uses the idea of personal focus as an alibi for indifference, as a moral justification for not allowing oneself to be affected by another’s suffering, as a shield against any demand that comes from the world. This version turns autonomy into isolation and confuses maturity with emotional impermeability. It is the philosophy of “everyone with their own problems,” of “it’s not my responsibility,” of cowardly withdrawal disguised as wisdom.
The second interpretation is the fusional one—the one that refuses any boundary, that lives the other’s life as if it were one’s own, that cannot distinguish where one’s existential territory ends and the other’s begins. Here, “focus on what depends on you” sounds impossible or even immoral, because everything seems to depend on everyone. It is the philosophy of total responsibility for the other, of love that becomes invasion, of care that infantilizes, of help that prevents maturation. Paradoxically, this way of relating, although it appears generous, is profoundly violent—because it denies the other the fundamental right to live their own consequences, to learn through their own mistakes, to constitute themselves as an autonomous subject of their own trajectory.
But there is a third way of inhabiting this tension, and it is this one that interests those who seek truly mature relationships. It is the understanding that you are simultaneously radically responsible for your own life and constitutively linked to the lives that touch yours. That focusing on what depends on you is not a way of ignoring the other, but precisely the condition for being able to contribute genuinely to the other. Because you can only offer something real when you have solid ground under your feet. You can only extend a hand with strength when your own feet are firmly planted.
This third path demands a relational sophistication that our culture rarely cultivates. It requires learning to distinguish between care and substitution, between support and invasion, between presence and fusion. It requires developing the capacity to perceive when your help is genuinely contributing to the other’s maturation and when it is, in fact, preventing life from doing its pedagogical work—that painful but irreplaceable work through which each person learns to inhabit their own existence with responsibility.
Because something must be said with brutal clarity: you cannot live another person’s life. You cannot learn for them, you cannot mature for them, you cannot make the choices that only they can make. And when you try—when you take on problems that belong to the other’s trajectory—you are actually committing a double violence: you are emptying your own existence while simultaneously robbing the other of the opportunity to become who they need to become through confrontation with their own consequences.
This does not mean indifference. It means something far more demanding: it means the courage to love without infantilizing, to care without replacing, to be present without solving. It means learning to tolerate the discomfort of watching someone you love face difficulties that you could perhaps alleviate—yet choosing not to, because you recognize that some difficulties are precisely the raw material through which that person is being forged. It is one of the most radical forms of respect: to recognize in the other the capacity to handle their own life, even when it hurts.
And here we arrive at a paradox few truly grasp: the more rooted you are in your own trajectory, the more you dedicate your existence to what genuinely depends on you—your maturation, your integrity, your excellence in what you have chosen to do—the more you have to offer others. Not because you become better than them, but because you become capable of being present in a way that does not require the other to be different from who they are. You can offer your perspective without needing it to be accepted. You can extend support without needing it to succeed. You can love without needing to save.
Entire organizations often operate in the first or second of these relational modes—either cultivating a culture of indifference where each person cares only for themselves and the notion of the collective empties out completely, or creating fusional dynamics where boundaries of responsibility become so blurred that no one knows anymore what truly belongs to their own territory of action. In both cases the result is some form of pathology: in the first, a coldness that dehumanizes; in the second, a confusion that paralyzes.
Mature teams develop something rare: the capacity of each member to be deeply dedicated to doing their part with excellence while remaining available to contribute to the whole in ways that do not dissolve individual responsibilities. It is possible to work together without merging. It is possible to collaborate without losing clarity about who is responsible for what. It is possible to care for one another without taking on consequences that belong to each individual.
But this requires a relational consciousness that goes far beyond protocols or processes. It requires each person to develop internally the capacity to discern—and that discernment does not come from ready-made formulas; it comes from a sensitivity cultivated through countless mistakes, through many times when you cared too much and prevented the other’s maturation, through many times when you withdrew too much and left someone alone when your presence could have made a difference. It is a knowing that emerges from lived experience, not from abstract concepts.
What makes this even more complex is that every relationship has its own geography. What is invasion in one relationship may be necessary care in another. What is healthy autonomy in one context may be abandonment in another. There is no manual. There is only the demand to remain present, attentive, constantly renegotiating with the other where the productive boundaries between us lie. And that negotiation often happens without words—through gestures, through offers or refusals of availability, through subtle ways of communicating “I’m here if you need me” or “I trust you can handle this.”
There is yet another dimension of this question that deserves attention: the relationship between doing your part and the possibility of collective transformation. Because there are moments when focusing exclusively on what depends on you is a form of blindness to systemic dynamics that cannot be transformed individually. And there are moments when trying to transform the system without first having consolidated your own integrity is pure illusion. Wisdom does not lie in choosing one or the other, but in developing the capacity to perceive which movement is appropriate in each moment.
When you are firmly rooted in your own trajectory—when you know who you are, where you are going, what genuinely matters to you—something remarkable happens: you stop using others as crutches for your own incompleteness. You stop needing them to be a certain way in order for you to feel okay. And it is precisely there that a kind of help becomes possible that truly helps—one that is not contaminated by your own unresolved needs, one that can see the other as they are and not as you need them to be.
This applies to both intimate and professional relationships. A leader who is not rooted in their own clarity of purpose and direction will inevitably use their team to fill voids that are theirs alone. A colleague who does not know where their own boundaries of responsibility lie will inevitably invade others’ territory or withdraw cowardly when their contribution would be valuable. An organization that has not cultivated clarity about what genuinely depends on each instance will inevitably create dynamics where responsibility dissolves and no one feels truly the author of anything.
And so we arrive at the crucial point: “focus on what depends on you” is not an instruction for individualism. It is a call for you to inhabit your own life in depth—not as an island, but as someone who recognizes that you can only contribute genuinely to the relational fabric that constitutes you when you stand firm in your own trajectory. It is to understand that the best way to care for the other is to care for yourself first, not out of selfishness, but because care that emerges from fullness has a completely different quality from care that emerges from emptiness.
Each person inhabits their own dynamic of reality, will, and desire. You cannot want for the other. You cannot desire for the other. You cannot decide for the other. And when you try, you are not loving—you are controlling. You are not helping—you are hindering. You are not caring—you are invading. Relational maturity begins when you develop the courage to let the other be responsible for their own life, even when that means watching them make choices you would not make, walk paths you would not walk, face consequences you would prefer they avoid.
But that courage does not come from distance. It comes from profound respect. It comes from recognizing that transformation cannot be imposed—it happens when the subject desires it, is ready, and takes responsibility for their own life. You can offer perspectives, you can share experiences, you can be present. But the movement toward change is irreducible and non-transferable—it belongs exclusively to the one who will transform.
Organizations that understand this stop trying to change people through programs, training, or demands. They begin to create conditions so that each person can find their own reasons to want to transform. They stop treating adults as if they needed to be managed in every detail and begin to trust each individual’s capacity to take responsibility for their trajectory—offering resources, opening spaces, creating contexts, but without the pretense of being able to do for the other what only they can do for themselves.
What is ultimately at stake is the possibility of truly mature relationships—those in which you can say, “I do my part, I seek excellence, I maintain integrity, and from that place I can offer the other what truly has value.” Not because you have become indifferent to the other’s fate, but because you have understood that true care never annuls autonomies. That real love is not fusion—it is an encounter between integrities. That genuine help does not replace—it amplifies the other’s capacity to help themselves.
And when you inhabit this understanding, something liberating happens: you stop carrying weights that are not yours. You stop feeling guilty for consequences that belong to others’ choices. You stop demanding of yourself an impossible omnipotence. And curiously, with that, you become more capable of being truly present—not carrying the other, but walking beside them. Not solving for the other, but offering companionship while they solve. Not saving, but bearing witness with genuine presence to the process through which each person learns to save themselves.
Because in the end, the hardest and most liberating truth is this: each person has their own life to live, their own lessons to learn, their own choices and therefore their own consequences to face. And the greatest gift you can give someone is not to spare them those consequences—it is to be present, with integrity and clarity about where you end and the other begins, while they cross what they need to cross in order to become who they need to become.
I myself have betrayed this truth countless times. I have invaded other people’s existences with the arrogance of someone who thinks they know the path better than the walker themselves. I have made heroic efforts to spare those I loved from pains that, I now see, were precisely the fire needed to forge them. I have fallen silent and distanced myself cowardly when my presence, even if uncomfortable, could have been an honest mirror. These mistakes do not make me any less convinced of what I say here—on the contrary: it was they that taught me, in my own flesh, that the only way to learn this delicate art of “not saving” is by having saved too much and suffering the consequences of it. The maturity I describe is not an achieved state of perfection; it is a permanent learning process made of scars that still burn when touched. And it is precisely because I still carry those scars that I dare to speak with such emphasis: because I know the price of ignoring this boundary and I also know the brutal relief that comes when we finally respect it.
There is here an existential philosophical truth about the human condition that keeps trying to erase itself, but lived experience does not allow us to ignore: being-in-the-world is constitutively solitary and, at the same time, irremediably relational. You are thrown into an existence that no one can live for you—every breath is yours, every choice is yours, every moment of anguish in the face of open possibilities is radically yours. And yet, you only become who you are through others, you only mean something in relation to, you only exist as singularity because you are woven into a fabric of othernesses that precede and exceed you.
This double movement—the irreducible solitude of one’s own existence and the relational constitution of everything we are—is not a problem to be solved. It is the very structure of human existence. And when you try to erase one of the poles of this tension, when you try to live as if you were pure isolated autonomy or pure dissolution into the other, you are not merely making a conceptual mistake. You are betraying the very way human life unfolds.
All genuine anguish is born from the impossibility of resolving the paradox. You cannot not choose—at every moment you are thrown into the necessity of giving direction to your existence, and no one can do that for you. But you also cannot choose outside the horizon of meaning that was woven before you, that is shared with others, that only exists because there is a “we” before there is an “I.” Your freedom is absolute and your insertion into conditioning structures is inescapable. Both things are true at the same time, and it is in sustaining this contradiction—not in resolving it—that any form of existential maturity resides.
This has brutal consequences for how we understand responsibility. Because if you are radically free to give meaning to your existence, then you are also radically responsible for it—you cannot blame circumstances, you cannot blame the past, you cannot blame others. Every moment is a possibility to inaugurate something new, to break with previous determinations, to say “no” to what seemed inevitable. But that same vertiginous freedom, which places you as the absolute author of your life, coexists with the fact that you did not choose to be born, did not choose the body you inhabit, did not choose the structures of meaning available in the culture into which you were thrown. You are simultaneously author and character in a story that began without you.
And it is precisely there—in that zone of undecidability between determination and freedom—that the question of responsibility toward the other acquires its real density. Because if you recognize in the other the same existential structure that inhabits you—that condition of being thrown into an existence that is simultaneously free and situated—then you can neither abandon them to their fate (as if they were pure self-determined freedom) nor substitute their choices (as if they were pure determination without possibility of rupture).
What you can do—and this is everything and it is a lot—is to be present as a witness to the other’s struggle with their own existence. You can offer what only someone from the outside can offer: a perspective on possibilities that, from within the situation, may not be visible. You can expand the field of perceived choices without making the choice for the other. You can remind the other that they are free even when everything seems determined. But the anguish of choosing, of giving meaning, of assuming responsibility for one’s own life project—that anguish is non-transferable.
And here lies something that contemporary relationships often cannot bear: the demand that each person sustain their own existential anguish. We live in a culture that offers a thousand ways to escape this anguish—distractions, ready-made certainties, pre-fabricated identities, life scripts that promise to spare us the terror of having to invent who we are. And in relationships, we often seek in others relief from this anguish—we want them to tell us who we are, to validate our choices, to spare us the vertigo of our own freedom.
But mature relationships are those in which each person sustains their own anguish and, from that place, can meet the other not as a solution to their emptiness, but as companionship in the shared crossing of existences that remain, in the final instance, radically singular. It is possible to be together without merging. It is possible to walk side by side recognizing that, in the end, each is walking their own journey. It is possible to love deeply without demanding that the other fill what only you can fill by assuming authorship of your own life.
Organizations that reach sufficient maturity to recognize this existential structure in their members stop treating people as resources to be managed and begin to recognize them as singular existences in the process of self-constitution. They stop offering ready-made solutions and begin to create spaces where each person can confront their own questions. They stop promising total security and begin to cultivate the collective capacity to productively inhabit the constitutive insecurity of the human condition.
Because in the end—and here we arrive at the point where philosophy and everyday life meet without mediation—there is no separation between “who you are” and “how you relate.” You constitute yourself in relationships. But you can only constitute yourself genuinely if you assume that no one can do for you the work of giving meaning and direction to your own existence. The paradox remains: you are who you are because there are others. But you only become who you can be when you assume, in the radical solitude of your freedom, the responsibility for inventing your own life.
And perhaps the highest existential wisdom is this: to learn to love the other precisely in their irreducible alterity, in their freedom that no fusion can capture, in their solitude that no care can completely dissolve. To learn to be present without colonizing the other’s existence. To learn to contribute without replacing. To learn that the greatest act of love is not to spare the other from their own life, but to recognize in them the same existential dignity you claim for yourself—the dignity of having to choose, of having to give meaning, of having to assume consequences, of having to invent, moment by moment, who one is becoming.

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