Walk through an airport bookstore, scroll the podcast charts, or listen to a leadership keynote, and you’ll likely find lessons on boundaries and burnout. Celebrities talk about therapy with a casualness that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Coaches tell C-suite executives to “lead with vulnerability.” And bestselling books like The Gifts of Imperfection, *You Should Talk to Someone, and The Body Keeps the Score *have given the world a common vocabulary for talking about anxiety, shame, and trauma.

It’s easy to conclude that we’re living in the Golden Age of Vulnerability. And that’s good news. All these developments are positive for a culture that, for too long, encouraged silence around the work of personal healing. Yet—even as our culture embraces vulnerability—many of us are reckoning with a seemingly contradictory trend. It can feel harder than ever to ask for help.

To say, “I’m struggling,” takes honesty. To ask, “Can you help me?” is to request time, attention, and follow-through. It risks inconvenience. It risks rejection. It can even feel like a status shift: the helper stays competent while the helped becomes “needy.” Psychologists have been describing versions of this for decades. Asking for help can threaten self-esteem because it can imply inferiority or loss of control. Many people feel a quiet fear that they’ll be judged as less capable or more dependent.

All this makes sense in a society that prizes rugged autonomy as moral virtue.

These days, the aversion to asking for help is often less a fear that other people are cruel than a worry that they’re simply tired or overcommitted. Research on suicide risk underscores how dangerous this can become: feeling like a burden is one reason people stop reaching out. Of course, the issue isn’t limited to a crisis. Everyday resistance to reaching out can degrade the quality of life and deepen an epidemic of loneliness and social isolation.

Still, here’s some welcome news: We are often wrong about how unwilling people are to help.

In a series of studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, people underestimated—by as much as 50 percent—how likely others were to comply with a direct request for help. At the same time, potential helpers tend to underestimate how uncomfortable asking feels, including the role of embarrassment. People who need support hold back, while people who might help assume they would have been asked.

To address a crisis of belonging in today’s world, we need a shift in how we think about asking for help.

In modern life, help is often interpreted through a scorekeeping lens: Who owes whom, who has taken too much, what’s fair. There are reasons this mindset takes hold. Much of life runs on transactions. Exchange is explicit, time feels scarce, and many people feel they’re barely keeping up. Under stress, the logic of the marketplace leaks into relationships. The “don’t owe anyone” instinct can start to look like an ethical ideal.

Behavioural research shows how quickly the frame changes behaviour. In a famous field experiment in Israeli daycares, when researchers introduced a small fine for late pickups, late pickups increased. The fine turned a moral obligation into a transaction. Parents stopped feeling: “I’m making a teacher wait.” They started feeling: “I’m paying for extra time.” When you switch the frame—from social to monetary—you change the behaviour.

Transactional scorekeeping turns care and support into a form of accounting.

And all this is anathema to belonging. Belonging requires the opposite premise: that people are allowed to need, and allowed to be temporarily out of balance. This kind of grace makes life humane. The alternative to transaction is reciprocity: a living relationship where people take turns carrying weight over time. Reciprocity isn’t a rigid balancing of payments. It’s continuity. It’s trust built across uneven seasons. The gift keeps moving.

What does reciprocity sound like in practice? “I’ll cover your kid’s pickup today—and I know I can count on you someday when I need it.” It looks like coworkers who trade support during intense weeks without turning it into a moral scorecard. It looks like friends who don’t keep a ledger of who texted first, who hosted last, or who needed more this year. The point isn’t to keep everything balanced in the moment. The point is to keep the relationship strong over time. It’s the long-game of community.

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We can all do our part to shift from transaction to reciprocity, one small practice at a time. For parents, it can be as simple as modeling it out loud: “We ask for help in this family—and we help others when we can.” For schools, it can be one clear rule teachers repeat and reward: asking for help with an assignment is part of doing well, not a sign you’re behind. For workplaces, it can be a standing norm that makes support ordinary: Bring questions, and treat asking as professionalism. And for each of us, it can be a personal discipline: Practice asking for help before you’re desperate. Sit with the discomfort. Make the small ask anyway.

AI is making this cultural shift urgent. Chatbots will only get better at offering the frictionless comfort of a “friend” who never gets tired and never says no.

But here’s the thing: We need to need other people.

While we should celebrate society’s growing embrace of vulnerability, we need to take a step further toward: It’s time for a focus on building a culture of mutual care.