I hope I don’t offend you by suggesting this, and I’m ready to face a hard rejection - but you could probably benefit from saying No to obligations/responsibilities more often, and caring a little bit less about always doing the right thing. Murphy’s law means people fill their life with complexity until there’s no room left.
> I hope I don’t offend you by suggesting this, and I’m ready to face a hard rejection - but you could probably benefit from saying No to obligations/responsibilities more often
A couple of things. I'm outlining common challenges so your advice would have to be applied broadly. You'd be asking a large chunk of the population to not be engaged in their community, etc.
Past that, my not-absolutely-critical activities did wind down when catastrophe after catastrophe became the new norm. In that phase, what was left was minimal for survival. Letting any of that go would just tack-on another catastrophe.
Again - the larger point is that I wasn't an outlier for the whole of the US. However, within the group that have the resources to post here, midday, I might be an outlier.
I'm from the EU, and we do approach things differently here - e.g. we pay more taxes and social security (net income is probably 70% or less of what a dev with my experience makes in the US), but as a result don't have to take care of the community so much. Cities/state/church are taking care mostly, and they do get paid for that.
Roads are most of the time not a problem - where I'm living at least. We had a pothole in our street three years ago, I called a number, and a week later it was fixed.
With two kids, I could get away for a few weeks with just driving them and the wife to school/kindergarten/work, and ordering groceries online. I have an electric car which I charge at home and which doesn't need any maintenance besides the once-a-year checkup. Aside from that, there are hardly any must-dos.
I did help friends move when we were younger, but now they just hire companies for that. Certainly wouldn't feel obligated to help someone move, what with having the kids at home and all.
If there's time for more activities, fine (we usually do loads of stuff); but if catastrophe hits, then the week might be boring for everybody, but the freed up energy can be spent to work on the issue at hand. I understand and appreciate that it is a _very_ privileged situation I'm in, but I also know that I'm not really an outlier among software developers in my country.
Maybe this is not feasible where you are living and in your situation. But maybe you can scale down even more than you thought.
