A guardrail is conceptually and crucially different from a boundary. Boundaries are easy to conceive of as a neutral, malleable demarcation, a property line: no match for the hulking semitruck that is the pressure to fill all of our time with work. Guardrails, by contrast, are designed with the understanding that we need protection. Not because we’re fragile or undisciplined, but because the forces that undergird work today—especially the obsession with growth and productivity—are indiscriminate in their destruction. They flatten even our best intentions and find power in our precarity.

Boundaries are personal. But guardrails are structural.