I recently finished Timothée Parrique’s Abrandar ou Morrer, a rigorous dismantling of the growth myth and a compelling case for degrowth economics.¹ The book is thorough: on decoupling, on GDP’s blindness to well-being, on the political conditions for transition. And yet, as I read, I kept remembering that I had written about another angle on sustainability, years ago, that I hadn’t picked up since.

Parrique writes about ecological footprints, about extractive economies, about what we take from the planet and fail to replenish. But there’s another ecology we inhabit, one made of relationships, conversations, encounters, and in this ecology too, we leave traces. What footprint do we leave in people?

The question isn’t absent from degrowth thinking. Parrique mentions well-being, conviviality, the quality of life that might emerge from producing and consuming less. Kate Soper’s “alternative hedonism” (finding pleasure in slowness, in having enough rather than always more) points in a similar direction.² But these remain secondary to the economic and ecological analysis, as they do in most sustainability discourse. The relational dimension, how we affect each other’s inner lives, what residue we leave in the people we touch, stays peripheral. I wonder if the apparent disconnect from these global and macro issues is due to this.

I want to move it to the centre.

beyond legacy

I don’t mean legacy in the conventional sense: the achievements remembered, the work that outlasts us, the stories that belong in a panegyric. I mean something more intimate and less visible: the residue we leave in the inner lives of people we’ve touched. The way someone feels about themselves after years of knowing us. The patterns of thought or feeling we’ve transmitted, often without awareness. The quality of presence, or absence, we’ve offered.

I remember, in my teens, someone asking me if I believed in life after death. I recall answering that I did, if by life we considered the memory that we leave in the people that outlive us.

Parents think about this, sometimes obsessively. Psychological theory has left in common sense the vague but persistent idea that what we do and fail to do leaves marks on our children’s psychological structure. Studies confirm what intuition already knows: that neglect, violence, and the absence of love have effects on the foundations of any person. But this transmission doesn’t require the irreversible condition of parenthood. It happens between lovers, colleagues, friends, even strangers in repeated encounters. Wherever relationship exists, there is transmission.

how we mark each other

The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion gave us a way to think about this that I find more useful than most.³ He described how, in the earliest relationship between mother and infant, something crucial happens that sets a template for all subsequent relating. The baby experiences raw, unprocessed sensations (hunger, discomfort, nameless dread) that it cannot yet make sense of. The mother, or whoever performs this function, receives these states, contains them, processes them through what Bion called “reverie,” and returns them in a form the baby can tolerate. The screaming terror becomes manageable distress. The formless chaos becomes something that can be thought about.

This is what happens, or fails to happen, in relationships throughout life. When someone brings us their distress, their confusion, their unprocessed experience, we can do several things with it. We can receive it, hold it, help transform it into something more bearable. Or we can refuse it, deflect it, send it back amplified. Or, and this is common, we can become so overwhelmed that we pass on our own unprocessed material in return.

What cannot be metabolised is passed through.

This is the mechanism behind intergenerationality. The anxiety that a grandmother couldn’t process becomes the depression her daughter lives with, becomes the addiction her grandson develops. Not through genetics alone, but through the quality of relating: through what was contained and what was expelled, what was transformed and what was passed on raw.

The television series Succession offers a vivid illustration, even if fictional. What gets transmitted in the Roy family isn’t simply “toxicity”. That word has become too vague to mean anything. It’s a specific relational model: that love is transactional, that worth must be perpetually earned through performance, that intimacy is a weapon to be deployed strategically, that vulnerability is weakness to be exploited. Each child absorbs this model and replicates it, sometimes inverting it (the rebellion that remains defined by what it opposes), sometimes amplifying it. The father cannot contain his own terror of insignificance; he passes it to his children as a demand they can never satisfy. They, in turn, cannot metabolise this impossible demand; they transmit it to their own relationships, their employees, eventually their children. The chain continues until someone, if anyone, develops the capacity to process rather than transmit.

the invisibility of relational damage

We live in a culture structurally hostile to this kind of attention. The same forces that make ecological sustainability difficult — short-termism, the pursuit of immediate gratification, the habit of externalising costs — operate in our relational lives.

Consider how we speak of relationships as things we “have” rather than processes we sustain. Consider the ease with which we discard connections that become inconvenient, the belief that people are replaceable, the fantasy that we can exit relationships without remainder. Consider the attention economy that fragments presence, making the slow work of genuine encounter increasingly rare.⁴

There’s also a convenient blindness at work. Ecological damage is increasingly visible: melting glaciers, burning forests, plastic-filled oceans. But relational damage hides better. The person we’ve diminished doesn’t show up in any metric. The potential we’ve stunted, the trust we’ve eroded, the anxiety we’ve transmitted. These leave no visible trace in the world, only in the inner lives of others. And those inner lives are private, protected by the very boundaries that make intimacy possible.

This invisibility serves us. It allows us to move through the world without confronting the accumulation of our relational effects. The colleague who dreads Monday mornings because of our management style, the friend who feels slightly smaller after every interaction, the partner who has learned to hide parts of themselves to avoid our reaction: these consequences remain abstract, deniable, someone else’s problem. We externalise the costs of our relational patterns just as industries externalise the costs of pollution.

I’m not proposing a programme. Programmes are part of the problem: the belief that complex human realities can be addressed through methodologies, frameworks, five-step processes. What I’m suggesting is more modest: a question that might be worth holding without rushing to answer.

not impact, but non-depletion

What would it mean to think of ourselves as sustainable, or unsustainable, in our relationships?

The ecological metaphor, pushed further, suggests an uncomfortable path. Sustainability isn’t primarily about leaving things better than we found them. That’s a higher standard, and perhaps an unrealistic one. Sustainability is about not depleting. Not extracting more than can be replenished. Not leaving systems less capable of supporting life than they were before.

Applied to relationships, this reframes the question. It’s not “how can I have maximum positive impact on others?” — that’s the language of influence, of intervention, of the saviour complex. It’s closer to: am I leaving people depleted or replenished by their encounters with me?

This is where Soper’s alternative hedonism becomes relevant beyond economics. She argues that the conventional consumer vision of the good life has become self-defeating, creating stress, environmental degradation, and diminishing returns of actual satisfaction. She proposes instead a pleasure found in sufficiency rather than maximisation. The same logic applies to relationships. The extractive model, taking what we need, maximising what we get from others, treating connections as resources to be optimised, depletes everyone involved, including ourselves. A relational alternative hedonism might find pleasure not in accumulating connections or maximising influence, but in the quality of presence we offer and receive.

This is a different question from whether people like us, whether they find us impressive, whether they would speak well of us. Someone can be charming, admired, successful by every conventional measure, and still leave a trail of depleted people behind them. The depletion happens slowly, invisibly, in ways that the depleted themselves might not recognise until much later, if ever.

The question also differs from whether we’re “nice” or “good” in any simple sense. Genuine honesty can be difficult to receive. Real care sometimes requires saying things people don’t want to hear. Any healthy relationship itself involves frustration, discomfort, the refusal to gratify certain wishes. But, when it works out, it leaves people with more capacity to think, feel, and relate than they had before. The discomfort serves something larger.

What distinguishes sustainable difficulty from depleting difficulty? I think it has to do with containment. When we bring difficulty in a way that includes the other person’s capacity to bear it, when we metabolise our own reactions enough to offer something they can work with rather than something that overwhelms, when we remain present through the aftermath rather than dropping a bomb and leaving, this is sustainable even when it’s hard. When we dump unprocessed material, when we use others as receptacles for what we can’t face in ourselves, when we relate to people as functions rather than as subjects with their own inner lives, this depletes, even when it looks civil on the surface.⁵

the organisational question

Companies increasingly measure their environmental footprint. But what footprint do they leave in the people who work there?

What do years of employment do to someone’s sense of possibility? Their capacity for trust? Their relationship with their own creativity, ambition, rest? These questions don’t appear in ESG reports. The metrics focus on diversity percentages, training hours, satisfaction scores — proxies that may or may not correlate with whether people are being depleted or replenished.⁶

I’ve worked with organisations that have excellent environmental policies and extractive relational cultures. The recycling is impeccable; the people are exhausted.

And I’ve seen the opposite: places with modest environmental credentials but genuine care for the inner lives of people who work there. The difference isn’t about being “nice” or avoiding conflict. It’s about whether the organisation functions as a container that transforms what passes through it, or as a system that merely processes people, using them up and replacing them when depleted. The language of “human resources” already tells us which metaphor dominates.

what remains

We will leave marks. The question is whether they become part of others’ capacity to live and relate, or burdens transmitted forward.

Most of us, examining our histories honestly, will find both: moments when we offered something genuinely containing, and moments when we dumped what we couldn’t bear. The goal isn’t a perfect record. It might be something more modest: to increase the ratio, slowly, over time. To ask, occasionally, what we’re leaving behind.

We tend to imagine legacy in terms of achievements, things built that outlast us. But there’s another legacy: the accumulated effect of all our relating.

This one doesn’t appear in obituaries. It ripples outward in ways we’ll never see, never know, never be credited or blamed for.

1. Timothée Parrique, Abrandar ou Morrer: A economia do decrescimento (Zigurate, 2025). Originally published in French as Ralentir ou périr: L’économie de la décroissance (Seuil, 2022). Parrique is an ecological economist at the University of Lausanne whose work has become a reference point in degrowth debates. ↩︎
2. Kate Soper, Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism (Verso, 2020). I’ve engaged with Soper’s framework in “For a New Definition of ‘Work’” and “Good Enough: Challenging the Tyranny of Excellence,” where her concept of alternative hedonism helps reframe our relationship with productivity and consumption. ↩︎
3. Bion’s work on “container/contained” and the transformation of “beta elements” (raw experience) into “alpha elements” (material available for thought) appears throughout his writings, particularly in Learning from Experience (1962) and Elements of Psychoanalysis (1963). For those unfamiliar with his dense prose, I recommend starting with the more accessible commentaries by Thomas Ogden or James Grotstein. ↩︎
4. I explored the fragmentation of attention in “On the Beauty of Distraction,” though there I was more interested in what distraction might offer than in what focused presence requires. ↩︎
5. Bion distinguished between the “container” that transforms what it receives and the “container” that merely stores or expels it. The same apparent act of listening can serve either function, which is why techniques and appearances tell us so little about the actual quality of relating. ↩︎
6. I’ve explored the gap between organisational intention and relational reality in “The Conversations of Lovers and Teams” and “Beyond ‘Soft Skills’.” ↩︎