The Volunteering Trap

I once spent an entire weekend organizing chairs.

Not metaphorically. Actual chairs. Hundreds of them, arranged in precise rows for a meditation event that would last ninety minutes and then need to be dismantled. I arrived at six in the morning and left after midnight. I hadn't eaten a proper meal. My back was wrecked. And when someone asked me how I was doing, I said - with complete sincerity - "This is great. I love being of service."

I was thirty-two. I had been volunteering in my spiritual organization for about eight years at that point. And I genuinely believed that sentence. I went home that night and journaled about how fulfilled I felt. Thirty years of journals, and that entry still makes me wince.

The Beautiful Story We Tell Ourselves

Here's how volunteering works in most spiritual communities: someone asks for help, and you say yes. Then they ask again, and you say yes. Then they stop asking because you've become the person who always says yes, so they just expect it. And you keep doing it because by now, "the person who always says yes" has become your identity.

Nobody forces this. That's the part that makes it complicated.

I wasn't coerced into setting up chairs at six in the morning. I wasn't threatened or manipulated. I was enthusiastic. I genuinely wanted to contribute. And for a long time, that contribution felt meaningful - because it was. Service is one of the most powerful practices available to anyone.

The problem isn't service. The problem is when service becomes the only way you know how to exist inside a community.

Psychologists have a term for this: identity fusion. Research by William Swann and colleagues at the University of Texas found that when people develop a visceral sense of "oneness" with a group, they become willing to make increasingly costly personal sacrifices for the group's benefit - and they do so voluntarily, even eagerly.¹ The fused person doesn't feel exploited. They feel purposeful. Which is exactly what makes it so hard to notice when generosity has crossed the line into self-erasure.

I didn't feel exploited either. I felt needed. I felt essential. I felt like the whole thing might fall apart without me, which - now that I'm writing it down - is a genuinely hilarious thing to believe about a chair arrangement. Look at you, Soren. Indispensable to the furniture logistics of spiritual awakening. Only took eight years to build that résumé.

The Doers and the Watchers

At one retreat, I noticed something that took me years to fully understand.

There were two groups of people. The first group showed up, participated in the main sessions, enjoyed the meals, and disappeared in between. They paid their contribution and received the experience. Fair enough.

The second group - much smaller - did everything else. They organized, cleaned, coordinated logistics, solved problems nobody else noticed existed, and then also tried to participate in the sessions, usually while mentally running through the next task.

I was firmly in the second group. Had been for years.

The tension between these two groups was constant but unspoken. The doers resented the watchers for not helping. The watchers didn't even notice there was anything to help with. And the system itself never addressed this imbalance because, honestly, why would it? It was working. People were showing up. Events were running smoothly. The chairs were in perfect rows.

There he goes again - Soren, silently fuming over someone else's unearned serenity while arranging name tags at 5:45 AM. Real spiritual progress happening here.

The fact that a handful of people were burning out to make it all possible wasn't a system failure. It was a system feature.

When Generosity Becomes a Cage

There's a difference between choosing to give and being unable to stop giving.

The first is generosity. The second is compulsion wearing generosity's clothes.

I volunteered because I believed in the mission. That was true. But I also volunteered because I didn't know what my role in the community was if I wasn't the person solving problems. Without the tasks, who was I in that room? Just another person sitting in a chair I'd arranged at six in the morning?

This is where it gets interesting, actually - and slightly embarrassing. Because I remember thinking, during that specific period, that I was modeling good behavior. That other people would see my dedication and be inspired to contribute more. That I was leading by example. I genuinely thought this. What I couldn't see at the time was that I wasn't leading anyone anywhere. I was running in circles, calling it a path, and wondering why nobody was following me. I'm making this sound like a clean realization. It wasn't. It was years of slow, awkward stumbling toward a truth I could have seen in about fifteen minutes if I'd been willing to look.

This isn't unique to spiritual organizations. Research on compassion fatigue shows that people in sustained helping roles - nurses, social workers, therapists, volunteers - often experience what psychologist Herbert Freudenberger described as the exhaustion that comes from "intense devotion to a cause that failed to produce the expected result."² The term he used, back in 1974, was burnout. And the profile he described was eerily specific: perfectionism, missionary zeal, inability to delegate, and a self-imposed obligation to make things work.

I read that description years later and felt like someone had been watching me through a window.

The uncomfortable part wasn't recognizing the pattern. It was realizing I'd been proud of it. I wore exhaustion like a badge. "I'm committed." "I'm reliable." "I give everything." What I didn't say, because I couldn't see it yet: "I have no idea who I am without this."

The Moment It Cracked

There was a specific afternoon - I can't tell you the year without giving too much away, but I can tell you the feeling.

I was sitting in a meeting where someone was explaining the next project. More events. More coordination. More weekends. And something in me, very quietly, said: I don't want to do this anymore.

Not "I don't believe in this anymore." Not "This is wrong." Just: I'm tired. I want to live my own life with my own choices.

But how do you leave a role that's become who you are? How do you say "I don't want to" in a community where wanting to serve is considered a sign of spiritual progress? How do you step back without it looking like you're stepping away from the practice itself?

I didn't have an answer then. What I had was guilt - for even wanting to stop.

Looking back, that version of me had spent so long confusing exhaustion with devotion that he couldn't tell them apart anymore. He was wrong about a lot of things. But he was also doing the only thing he knew how to do, with the tools he had at the time. I can't fault him for that. I can only be glad he eventually got tired enough to stop.

What I Do Differently Now

These days, I volunteer for nothing.

That sounds dramatic. Let me qualify: I don't volunteer automatically. I don't say yes before checking whether I actually want to.

What I do instead is ask one question before committing to anything: Would I do this if nobody knew I was doing it?

If yes - genuine yes, not "I should" yes - then it might be real generosity. If the honest answer involves needing to be seen, needed, or appreciated, then what I'm actually doing is purchasing belonging with labor. And that transaction, however spiritual it looks from the outside, has a cost.

I still meditate - most mornings, about twenty minutes, usually before anyone else in the house is awake. I still go to gatherings occasionally. But I stopped treating presence as an obligation and started treating it as a choice. My practice has gotten simpler as it's gotten more honest - fewer events, less infrastructure, more actual sitting with myself. And one thing I've completely dropped is the belief that doing more makes you more spiritual. It doesn't. It just makes you more tired.

And the community? It functions just fine without me setting up chairs at 6 AM. Somehow it survived.

Five Questions Before You Say Yes

If you're volunteering in any community - spiritual, professional, charitable - here's a framework I wish I'd had twenty years ago:

1. "Am I choosing this or defaulting to it?" There's a difference between actively deciding to help and automatically filling every gap because that's what you do. The first is a choice. The second is a reflex.
2. "What happens if I say no?" If saying no feels genuinely impossible - if it triggers guilt, fear of judgment, or anxiety about your standing - that's information. Healthy communities don't collapse when one person takes a break.
3. "Is this sustainable for six more months?" Not "can I push through this weekend" but "could I keep doing this without resentment building?" If the honest answer is no, you're already past the boundary you should have set.
4. "Who am I in this community without this role?" If you can't answer that question - if stripping away the tasks leaves you feeling invisible - the volunteering isn't just generosity. It's identity infrastructure. And that's worth examining.
5. "Am I promoting balance while living in imbalance?" This was my specific trap. I was part of a system that taught inner peace while running myself ragged to keep that system functioning. The hypocrisy eventually becomes impossible to ignore. Eventually.

The Paradox

Here's the tension I still haven't fully resolved, and I'm not sure anyone can:

Service is genuinely valuable. Helping others is one of the most direct paths to getting out of your own head, and spiritual traditions across every culture recognize this for good reason. Some of the best moments in my twenty-plus years of practice happened when I was doing something for someone else with no thought of return.

But the systems that benefit from your service have no built-in mechanism to tell you when you've given enough. Organizations are still organizations, even spiritual ones - they optimize for function, not for the wellbeing of any single part. So the person who gives freely and the person who gives compulsively look exactly the same from the outside. The system rewards both identically. It has no reason to distinguish between them, and every reason not to.

Which means the only person who can tell the difference is you. And you can't do that if you've spent years training yourself to treat your own needs as a sign of spiritual weakness.

That's the actual paradox: the thing that makes service beautiful - selflessness - is also the thing that makes it dangerous. You need enough self to know when your selflessness has stopped being a gift and started being a cage. And nobody teaches you that. You learn it the hard way, or you burn out. Sometimes both.

For You

If you're reading this and something feels familiar - if you're the person who always shows up first and leaves last, who says yes before the question is finished, who feels a strange mix of pride and exhaustion every time you volunteer - I'd ask you to sit with one question:

Are you giving because you want to, or because you've forgotten you're allowed to stop?

There's no wrong answer. But there is an honest one. And that honesty might be the most generous thing you've done in a while - generous toward yourself.

You're allowed to rest. You're allowed to say no. You're allowed to be in a community without carrying it on your back.

The chairs will get set up without you. I promise. And if they don't? That's not your fucking problem anymore.

They're just chairs.

Continue Exploring

What Your Guru Forgot to Tell You - Why "verify everything" is the most important spiritual instruction - and why almost nobody follows it.

What Nobody Tells You About Spiritual Organizations - They're still organizations. That obvious fact has non-obvious implications.

Notes & References

¹ Swann, W. B., Jetten, J., Gómez, A., Whitehouse, H., & Bastian, B. (2012). "When group membership gets personal: A theory of identity fusion." Psychological Review, 119(3), 441-456.

² Freudenberger, H. J. (1974). "Staff burn-out." Journal of Social Issues, 30(1), 159-165.