I really felt this, especially the idea that some of us get cast as the “mentat” whether we signed up for it or not .
I had a small but clarifying version of this just last week. I asked two close friends to join me for an adventure. Nothing extreme, just a long day trip with plenty of advance notice, and both declined. Which, on its face, is fine. But it forced me to confront something I’d been avoiding: I’m the load-bearing friend. If I don’t plan, nothing happens. If I don’t follow up, nothing gets followed through. If I don’t carry the cognitive load, the whole thing just… doesn’t exist. And when it comes time for someone to make some small sacrifice, they simply... don't.
So I decided, at least for now, to stop doing that. Not to cancel plans, but to cancel the creation and maintenance of plans. The itineraries, the reminders, the gentle prodding that turns “we should hang” into something real. The response has been telling about who actually saw and appreciated that effort, and who apparently just assumed I enjoyed playing that role.
This also reminded me of Craig Lambert’s "Shadow Work," which you may already know. His argument about how we’ve offloaded more and more unpaid labor onto individuals—booking, assembling, troubleshooting—feels very adjacent to what you’re describing here, just mapped onto social life. Some of us end up doing that invisible work for the people around us, too.
I really felt this, especially the idea that some of us get cast as the “mentat” whether we signed up for it or not .
I had a small but clarifying version of this just last week. I asked two close friends to join me for an adventure. Nothing extreme, just a long day trip with plenty of advance notice, and both declined. Which, on its face, is fine. But it forced me to confront something I’d been avoiding: I’m the load-bearing friend. If I don’t plan, nothing happens. If I don’t follow up, nothing gets followed through. If I don’t carry the cognitive load, the whole thing just… doesn’t exist. And when it comes time for someone to make some small sacrifice, they simply... don't.
So I decided, at least for now, to stop doing that. Not to cancel plans, but to cancel the creation and maintenance of plans. The itineraries, the reminders, the gentle prodding that turns “we should hang” into something real. The response has been telling about who actually saw and appreciated that effort, and who apparently just assumed I enjoyed playing that role.
This also reminded me of Craig Lambert’s "Shadow Work," which you may already know. His argument about how we’ve offloaded more and more unpaid labor onto individuals—booking, assembling, troubleshooting—feels very adjacent to what you’re describing here, just mapped onto social life. Some of us end up doing that invisible work for the people around us, too.