It’s Still Worth It

On what happens when connectors become depleted— and why they keep going anyway.

Who are the connectors in your life?

The people who sit at the intersection of so many different spaces, industries, geographies. Those who manage to always respond to that text, that email, even the stray phone call, and show up for the work events, dinners, and your kid’s birthday party. The nonprofit leaders toiling in the trenches to push for change and be there for their communities even in these daunting times. The caregivers working 3-4 shifts in a row, looking after loved ones and helping their patients heal, and doing it with grace and kindness. The teachers working miracles for our youth day after day with insufficient support and pay.

Do you ever wonder how they do it? Why they do it?

I’ve spent the last few posts in this series making the case that real connection requires friction — that the inconvenience, the difficulty, the showing-up-when-it’s-not-easy is precisely what makes a relationship real and lasting. But I’ve also been sitting with a harder question: what happens to the people who practice that most intensely, day after day, year after year?

What happens when empathy becomes exhaustion? When the connectors start to run dry?

· · ·

To answer that question, I sought out those in my world who I consider uber connectors — five people who demonstrate this not in theory, but in practice. What they told me was not what I expected.

Aaron Hurst — founder of the US Chamber of Connection and one of the foremost researchers on purpose at work — told me something that reframed the entire conversation. “When purpose stops being enough,” he said, “it’s usually because it’s been separated from the conditions that make it sustainable. Purpose without growth can feel static. Purpose without relationships can feel isolating.”

In other words: burnout isn’t a personal failing. It’s a design flaw. We’ve built a world where a small number of people carry a disproportionate amount of the work of connection — and then we call it a calling, as if that makes the weight bearable alone.

“People can handle a lot of challenges and emotional load. What they can’t handle is carrying it alone.”

~ Aaron Hurst

Maryam Banikarim — who built NYCNext, The Longest Table, and The Interval, and who has spent her career creating spaces for others to belong — learned this the hard way. She didn’t notice how depleted she’d become until her son said, “Mom, I’ll miss you,” and her heart started palpitating. “That was my body making a decision my brain was too stubborn to make,” she told me. The pause that followed gave her back time with her grandmother, her son’s last year at home, and the version of herself with actual interests. And what came out of it wasn’t less. It was more. “Sometimes the step back is the strategy.”

“I need a table where I’m not the host. Where someone else holds the space and I get to just sit in it.”

~ Maryam Banikarim

Cate Luzio who left a two-decade banking career to self-fund Luminary, a professional community now serving 15,000 members, named something I hadn’t heard anyone say quite so plainly: “Empathy can become a form of self-abandonment if you’re not careful. There were moments where I felt like I was disappearing inside the very thing I was creating.” She built the room she wished she could walk into at the end of the day and exhale. But she built it for others before she gave herself permission to use it.

“I built it for others before I fully let it exist for me.”

~ Cate Luzio

Ruth Ann Harnisch — philanthropist, crisis counselor, and what one writer memorably called “the punk rock fairy godmother of feminism” — became a Crisis Text Line volunteer after her beloved nephew ended his life. She turned the wound into the work. And when I asked how she carries the weight without being hollowed out, her answer was simple and absolute: “I couldn’t be a cheerful addition to the world if I was allowing myself to be hollowed and not filled.”

Service, for her, is not depletion. It is actually the engine that keeps her going.

And then there is Tulaine Montgomery, who led New Profit as CEO and has spent her career building what many call “love-centered leadership. She pushed back on something we rarely question: the idea that love makes leaders soft. “To love with vulnerability, steadiness, and courage requires phenomenal strength, power, and intelligence,” she said. But she was equally clear about the risk. “Love without wisdom can become extractive.” The antidote to burning out from caring is not to care less. It is to pair the love with wisdom — to know what is yours to carry, and what is not.

“It’s really the pairing of love and wisdom that enables a leader to be amplified, effective and durable.”

~ Tulaine Montgomery

· · ·

What strikes me, sitting with all five of these conversations, is that none of them said the exhaustion isn’t real. It is. Every single one of them has felt it, the depletion, the loneliness, the weight of being the one who holds the space for everyone else.

But not one of them said it wasn’t worth it or that they were going to stop.

What they said, in their unique ways, is that sustaining connection over the long haul requires something counterintuitive: you have to be willing to receive it, not just offer it. You need to be inside the community, not just building it from afar. You have to speak up when the tank is low. And you must be open to letting someone else hold the space sometimes.

The connectors in your life — the ones who always show up, always respond, always make you feel seen — are not running on an inexhaustible supply. They are making a choice, over and over, to keep going. Not because it’s easy. Because they have found, somewhere in the friction and the fatigue, that it is somehow still worth it.

The least we can do is make sure they know we see them.

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Your Turn

Who in your life keeps showing up — even when you suspect they’re running on empty? And have you ever told them what that has meant to you?

Drop it in the comments, or reply to this email. The best responses become part of this ongoing conversation — and maybe the next essay in the series.