This episode walks straight into the messy, human middle ground between loving people and losing yourself in the process. Using the story of Paul and Eunice—a sober helper and a deeply traumatized veteran—we unpack what compassion really looks like when trauma, addiction, resentment, and financial collapse all live under the same roof.
Guided by the compass of Freemasonry and the inner fortress of Stoic philosophy, we explore the idea of the cable tow as a moral boundary: the point beyond which “helping” turns into self-destruction. We connect that to how we run systems and services under stress—incidents, outages, RTOs, RPOs, blameless postmortems—and show that both people and platforms need the same thing: clear limits, honest observation, and recovery plans that actually work.
This isn’t an abstract seminar. It’s trauma, rent, sobriety, hatred, love, and the quiet power of one small, consistent life lived decently in front of another broken person.
In this episode, we explore:
How trauma reshapes a worldview—and why one honest counter-example can start to crack it
Why “compassion does not require self-immolation,” and what healthy boundaries really look like
How Marcus Aurelius would diagnose over-giving, resentment, and walking away “without hatred”
The parallels between personal recovery and organizational recovery: incidents, DR tests, and blameless postmortems
Practical steps for people who feel like Paul (the overwhelmed helper) or Eunice (the traumatized survivor) today
This is an episode about keeping your heart open and your compass steady.
Source #01: Paul and Eunice is a personal story from real people in my personal life. Names have been changed to protect the identities of the individuals.