On Personal Boundaries — but Not Our Own

These days we’re actively taught to build our personal boundaries: at home, at work, with friends, with anyone who crosses our path. We’re told why they matter, how to defend them, which practices let us feel confident and unembarrassed. But for the sake of social harmony, it would be just as useful to learn a no less important skill at the same time — respect for other people’s boundaries.

Right now the imbalance is obvious: people fight desperately for their own boundaries, at times without sparing a thought for the most basic boundaries of those around them. And that, often, is exactly what breeds the conflicts and the misunderstandings. Let me give a few utterly ordinary examples from everyday life, all about how we behave in public:

— Someone takes a video call or plays audio out loud, no headphones.

— Someone puts on cartoons for their kids through the phone or tablet speaker.

— Someone is drinking loudly and swearing, shouting or laughing, pulling every eye in the room.

— Someone is “showing off” their car stereo (and their taste in music) with the windows down, or driving with a busted muffler.

— Someone breathes down your neck or into your ear, pressing into you with their body or their bags in a queue.

— Someone in the theatre, sitting right in front of you, is more occupied with their phone — glowing like a flashlight straight into your eyes — than with what’s happening on stage.

— Someone tosses cigarette butts right by your home or your office.

— Someone uses shared spaces to store their personal things, or even their trash.

— Someone leaves a car blocking a lane and creating a massive jam, or sealing off the only way through.

— Someone sits in the car next to you with the engine running, and you have no choice but to breathe the exhaust.

You could go on like this forever.

But the moment you point out to these people — politely, even — that what they’re doing is a problem for the rest of us, you’ll often run straight into an aggressive reaction, as if you’d just trespassed on their most sacred values.

Once I was flying business class, Moscow to Yerevan. Almost every one of the boundary violations above was present on that flight, stacked up for maximum discomfort. Out of hundreds of flights, that one stayed with me. The child of a young man sitting across the aisle lay down almost at my feet and started playing on a tablet at full volume. I asked politely — I needed to get some work done in the air — and the boy’s father snapped back: “Listen, YOU, put your headphones on and work!” How would you have reacted? Maybe a book about stoicism and restraint isn’t the place to discuss the reactions one might wish for.

Maybe we’d do well to take a page, in part, from the Japanese, where other people’s boundaries are held up as an absolute? In their culture the boundaries of those around you come first, and your own come second. In other cultures, where social status is prized — among English gentlemen, say — it was always seen as natural, and no loss of face, to apologize, if only with a simple “Sorry,” even when you’d inconvenienced someone by pure accident.

Respect for other people’s boundaries, just as much as the demand that our own be respected — that’s the path to a socially healthy society.

“One person’s freedom ends where another’s begins.”

Here’s to respecting not just our own boundaries, but everyone else’s too! 😎