Why are people so shit?
Why are people so shit?
Once or twice a week after I’ve picked my kids up from school I hang out with a bunch of parents while the kids play in the bush.
One afternoon while chatting about ideas to support a family in the community, I went off on my soap box about how I want things to be in the world.
How I want to live in a world where everybody has enough.
One of the parents is less vocal. But he has a presence that when he speaks, I’m drawn to listen.
He seems like someone who knows a lot – not just intellectually, but with his full self – knowledge that is lived.
And he said ‘it won’t work because people are shit.’
And I could feel my whole body soften deeper into gravity. Because those words felt so true.
Simple yet true.
People are shit.
Because we can do what we like to defend the good ones. Protect our own identities of how good we are. And tell the good stories.
But as a human race, I felt the truth of it.
We’re shit (myself included).
I’m not here fob off possibility. And I’m also not here to bypass another truth.
I’m here to write about why I think we’re so shit to begin with. And perhaps what we might be able to do about it.
I sense that our shitness could be related with what has happened to care over the last number of centuries.
Because care has gradually been eliminated from our skillset across many many generations through a series of cultural and economic changes. So gradual that it almost feels unreal.
For most of human history, care wasn’t gendered in the way we understand it now. In many pre-industrial and Indigenous cultures, tending to the sick, the young, the dying, the community and the land, was simply part of what it meant to be human.
Everyone participated in making the world a better place for all people – because we needed each other for our survival. We needed the Earth, the plants and the animals.
When men moved into factories and formal employment, the home became separate – and everything that happened inside became “women’s work.” Birth, feeding, emotional labour, raising children, caring for elders – gradually assigned to women not because women were naturally suited to them, but because someone had to do them, and women were being pushed out of other aspects of life.
So care didn’t start as gendered. It became gendered through a reorganisation of who did what and where. And that reorganisation was never neutral. It concentrated social, emotional, economic and political power in one direction, and unpaid, invisible labour in another.
Once care was coded as women’s work, it inherited all the ways women were already being diminished. It became soft. Unskilled. Natural rather than learned. Something anyone could do – which in practice meant something no one needed to value or pay for.
The gendering of care was a demotion of care itself and those who cared.
As Western industrial economies took shape, public life such as work, politics and commerce were placed at the top of importance. Private life such as the home, bodies and the tending of people happened behind closed doors. This work ethic gave us a world where worth was measured by output. Slow, relational, unglamorous work was pushed down to the bottom. It simply didn’t count.
Colonisation fractured something even deeper. Many Indigenous and non-Western cultures held rich, communal understandings of care – for bodies, for community, for Country. What was lost wasn’t just land or language. It was entire ways of knowing how to be in relation to one another and the land.
The nuclear family, for all its warmth, compressed what had once been a communal web; aunties, elders, neighbours who knew your name – into a small private unit. When that unit struggled, we reached for words like failing or not coping, never questioning whether the structure itself was asking too much. Nor who it was designed to serve.
Then care got a price tag.
The move toward institutional care and education – paid aged care, childcare, disability support and schooling – filled real gaps that community and family could no longer hold within the nuclear structure. But commercialised care brought with it an unnamed distortion: care you pay for became more legitimate than care you simply give.
Tending got a dollar value, and anything that couldn't be invoiced became more invisible.
The relational, the reciprocal, the informal – all of it became harder to justify in a culture increasingly oriented around transaction, power and money.
And when women moved into paid work across the 20th century – a genuine and hard-won expansion of freedom – care didn’t get redistributed. It got left behind. The cultural conversation moved on without ever asking: who is doing the tending now?
None of this is about blame. These were complex, layered shifts – many of them driven by real needs, real hopes, real hungers for something better. And the truth is that some things did get better. But many things did not. And some – got worse.
The cumulative effect brought something much less talked about. A culture that is genuinely confused about care. We sense that we need it desperately. We just can’t quite find our way back to it because we don’t know where or how to find it.
What I notice, in myself and in the people I work with, is that individuals end up carrying the load of what was once a community effort. The depletion isn’t just personal. It’s inherited. Carried in nervous systems that have been trying to do too much, with too little support, for too long.
This isn’t a failure. It’s the predictable result of systems that stripped care of its value and then asked each of us to make up the difference without complaint.
We’ve landed with skills of competing, transaction and extraction. A type of care that touches you (or teases you rather) – but not enough to be deeply felt.
So of course, here we are. Being shit humans. Shit leaders. Doing shitty things to each other.
I’m sensing, not because we want to, but because we don’t know another way. We’re not even being modeled another way.
And yet, beneath all of it care never fully disappeared. It went underground. It survived in the humans who kept passing knowledge and practices between generations. In the communities that continued to gather, grieve, and celebrate together despite every structural pressure. In the activists, the organisers, the artists, the mutual aid networks, the community elders who refused to let tending become purely transactional. In the circles of people – often the most marginalised – who kept showing up for one another without payment, recognition or anyone calling it important.
Care has always had its keepers.
It has never been fully owned, fully institutionalised, fully bought. It has been waiting.
And something is shifting now. There is a growing hunger – not for self-care as a commodity, but for real care as a practice. For tending as a value. For the kind of presence and reciprocity that no market can manufacture.
People are exhausted by the simulation of care and starving for the real thing. That hunger is not weakness. It is the body wanting a real human need. Care.
The hum of care is still here. It’s time to turn towards it again and bring it back to life. Full bodied. Full sensory. Real care. The type of care that makes us feel more real.
This is why we need to have honest conversations with people in our lives around the history of care being devalued over time.
We need to build the skills of care that quietly got lost. Practicing them in small groups and communities who are ready to shift the culture together. And then begin to let care ripple through all the parts of our lives.
Then watch how the tiniest drops of care can transform the most painful moments into something more tolerable and perhaps even more beautiful.
That's where I'm putting my attention these days. Not because it's the answer to everything.
But because it's what care actually looks like once you stop trying to perform it for someone’s judgment.
Melting into Comfort is a free audio and email series I created for exactly this. A small, quiet place to begin practising what real care actually feels like — in your body, not just in theory.
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