Essay 3: The Spiders at NASA

The Architecture of Wellbeing Series

If your skeleton was just bones, there'd be a pile on the floor. So why do we imagine bones as the lasting element of our structure?

Bones are durable. They're visible. Dig a body out of the ground centuries from now and the bones may still remain, but bones cannot hold themselves up. That job belongs to fascia.

If you're thinking "Jen, I am not here for Anatomy 101," fair enough. But bear with me, because the bones in this analogy are the pillars of health you already know: sleep, nutrition, movement, stress management, connection. And just like bones, they cannot hold themselves up. The pillars are not stable, free-standing foundations. What holds them together remains less visible, more complicated, and almost never discussed. I think of it as a support like fascia: the connective tissue that holds structures in place, supports the whole system, and determines whether the bones can stand well or at all.

In the previous essays we looked at invisible labour and the conditions that make discipline easier or harder to sustain. Both point toward the same conclusion: wellbeing rarely rests on a single pillar. It behaves more like a system. This is widely acknowledged in public health - but less so in private.

In personal wellbeing, support is so complex to untangle that it's bloody hard to get right. From person to person, household to household, the fascia of life can look vastly different. Like those NASA spiders given caffeine, marijuana and LSD, then unleashed - each spun a completely different structure while tripping balls. It's safe to say our individual webs are sisters not twins.

The webs that form our support systems are dynamic, changeable and interactive. A couple who set out to achieve the same health goals in the same household can have very different results because of this. I used to witness this all the time in clinic when couples would commit together to the same program. On occasion, a sparkly bright-eyed man with more energy and 5 less kgs to his name would emerge, while his deflated wife phones me to ask "what did I do wrong?" They did the same program. She did nothing wrong. But her infrastructure was different.

He did the program and his life got quieter for a week. He dropped the after work beer and ate what she handed him. She had to cook a different meal for the kids, manage the washing, ride her hormonal waves and crashes, then learn that her youngest needed an orange shirt in the class WhatsApp for Harmony Day 5 minutes before getting in the car to leave for school. She probably planned and booked the program too, while stressed to the eyeballs.

What each partner carried into that week - and every week before it - had a name: capacity.

Capacity isn't something you generate through desire or effort alone. It's something that gets built up or stripped away by the conditions surrounding your life. When the conditions are right, the bones hold up. When they're not, tension can pull in so many directions that healthy behaviour stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like a luxury someone else gets to have. When we look at what that holding up produces, we stop seeing the pillars as foundations and start seeing them as outputs.

If the fascia of life is our conditions and capacity our generator, then discipline is an output too. So is genuinely having your shit together. While the visible results of an invisible infrastructure are usually where our focus goes, the infrastructure making them possible is built or dismantled by the conditions surrounding a life.

Those conditions are complex and imperfect. They change, affect each other, and can even be transferred from person to person. In everyday language this is sometimes described as swings and roundabouts. Some are practical. Some are financial. Some live entirely inside relationships.

Caregiving is a classic example. Get your children consistently looked after and you suddenly have a guilt free hour that belongs entirely to you. That hour might become a walk, a class, or just the radical experience of going to the toilet by yourself. For some people that hour costs money. For others it depends on whether a grandparent is available, a partner is present, or your kids are both old enough and capable of being left alone. Same hour. Completely different infrastructure behind it.

Money is another. More of it brings choice. A walk is now as plausible as meditating in a float tank. Cleaning can be outsourced. Meals can be scaffolded with a delivery kit. Time, in effect, can be purchased - but hold the phone. More money sometimes means more work, which means less time or moving away from family support, which means the thing money was supposed to buy becomes harder to access anyway.

Welcome to a capacity tangle.

Relationships are a real doozy because we transfer capacity here. One person irons a shirt and walks out the door while the other starts the process the night before. Research consistently backs what many women already know. Roughly one and a half to two times more unpaid household work is performed by women than men. Sociologist Alexandra Daminger confirms it's not just the physical tasks either, but the anticipating, monitoring and coordinating that compounds the load. The phone calls I received in clinic almost always spoke to this.

Caregiving, money and relationships are just three threads in a web that includes many others, none of them isolated, all of them pushing, pulling and shifting the starting line of your day. Comparing the high energy unicorn with zero anxiety's capacity to her anaemic, neurodiverse friend is clearly not a fair fight. The first might step out of bed ready to face a very reasonable task list, in order. She checks off her list and has time for wellbeing. The second is exhausted before she stands up, wondering why so many cupboards are open and if she misunderstood the tone in a meeting last week. Where was that list?

Now remember those little NASA spiders. The one with a balanced and even web gets to sit comfortably at the centre. The others had tangles and capacity transfers that pulled the network in directions it was never designed to hold. All the spiders might be trying to sit in the middle, but one is there and the others are not. They built the web with the tools they had and even with 8 tiny dilated pupils don't see what went wrong because the problem was not in effort, it was the conditions.

While it's easy to assume we all want a balanced wellbeing web, it's human nature to be genuinely terrible at balance. We're notorious for finding a good thing, overdoing it, and then having to readjust later. In a network of factors pushing and pulling in so many directions, we often struggle to see which lever to pull, when, and for what. So if a capacity blue zone is about sitting in a space of balance, understanding how the parts interact is where the real work begins. In the next essay we’ll look more closely at what those interacting conditions actually are.