Communities rise and sometimes crumble on one simple truth: people are everything. Their energy, their perspective, their lived experience. During our X Space episode with Peter Elfrink on The Economics of Community, this truth kept resurfacing in ways that felt both grounding and quietly profound.

Peter spoke about burnout with a clarity that stripped away any romanticism around “pushing through.” “In dealing with burnout, you must acknowledge that it is happening or will happen,” he said. That acknowledgement isn’t a weakness; it’s a form of honour. In decentralized spaces, where ownership is collective and responsibility is distributed, leaders don’t fix burnout—they witness it, they make room for it, and they stand beside people as it unfolds. “The first and most important thing to do is to be there,” Peter added. Not to prescribe, not to rush, but to be present. Because presence says, “Your energy matters to this ecosystem.”

But the heart of the conversation wasn’t about burnout. It was about the unseen economics that govern human participation. Peter put it beautifully: “It’s important to explore the energies that drive people’s actions, because understanding what motivates or demotivates someone in a decentralised ecosystem is what helps us create a thriving community.”

In that moment, it became clear that community building isn’t an operational function; it’s a protective one. The role of a community leader isn’t to extract value but to hold space to ensure that the perspectives people bring are respected, the experiences they carry are acknowledged, and the emotional currencies they expend are recognised.

This episode revealed what many forget: communities don’t thrive because of systems.

They thrive because we honour the people who shape them.

Ready to reshape your approach to community leadership? Listen to the whole X Spaces episode on The Economics of Community with Peter Elfrink. [https://x.com/DeepFunding