I’ve been trying to make a more concerted effort to care less. The act of caring about stuff has been a blind spot of mine for a while. I care and I care a lot. I used to wonder if I was a bad person since I cared about so much stuff. My anxious mind convinced me that I cared about stuff — or maybe I was pretending to care but how would I know the difference? — just to make me feel better about myself. I looked into this; am I virtue signaling when I care about how to resolve the homelessness crisis? I sincerely wondered if I was just pretending to care to make myself feel better about myself and the world. I thought, There are plenty of people that are so self-consumed that they convince themselves they aren’t narcissists when they are, maybe that’s what I’m doing when I care about this stuff.
I don’t want to not care about this stuff. But I also realize I’m not much use whenever I’m caring so hard that I’m actively stunned with pessimism therefore not making anything better but acting rather as a block in the road. Caring, or the act of, is a passive act; we are observing and absorbing the world around us, but we aren’t necessarily impacting the world by caring. It’s not to say that caring isn’t a good thing. Caring is the impetus needed to do something. So I don’t want to stop caring as much; rather, I’d prefer to simply care as much without being as bothered.
I’ve been reading up on stoicism. It’s the ancient philosophy or way of living often conflated with the demeanor of Keanu Reeves. I’ve come to learn that stoics — real stoics like Aurelius or Epictetus or Piggliuci — aren’t incapable of joy, love, excitement, or exasperation. They are capable of the full spectrum of emotions, but they aren’t much more focused on reacting to our reactions. We can’t necessarily control how we react to something, but we can train ourselves to react to the reactions. If we, in the heat of frustration, react and say a hurtful comment to somebody that we care about, and would not have otherwise said without the frustration, we can be sure to apologize, make amends, and using that as a lesson to ensure we’re less likely to react in frustration. What’s empowering about stoicism is that life is a stream, we are always changing and improving and worsening, and the goal of every day should be to focus on what’s within our control. A criticism of stoicism is that it encourages people to be so accepting of our circumstances that we don’t strive to overcome horribly unlikely odds or to fight against something as nebulous and entrenched as racism or sexism. I understand these criticisms because I had them early on in my readings.
Yet stoicism doesn’t only not actually teach that, the philosophy provides you with the mindset and approach to make progress towards those nebulous, dynamic goals. Stoicism teaches you to focus on what’s in front of you and working from there upwards; if you’re actively trying to combat racism, you first seek out to teach those close to you how to be antiracism, then you work on getting antiracist officials elected, and then you seek to create a movement that carries that actual change elsewhere. That isn’t to say it isn’t easy, but it is to say that is strengthens our ability to live in the now.
As I am somebody that sees Herculean obstacles and somehow thinks both Ah, people have overcome worse odds and Yeah, see, uh, this is incredibly unlikely to overcome so I’m gonna go on a walk with Duncan, it’s pretty important I focus on learning how to be a bit gentler, less reactive, frightened, and bothered, and also just generally calmer and more relaxed. I do feel that stoicism has generally improved my mind in combating depression and anxiety but intrusive and discursive thoughts tend to make me regress in my strategies in dealing with what feels like overwhelming stress. Stoicism has helped me focus on working on this struggle. It’s also pretty cool that stoicism teaches something similar to cognitive behavioral therapy; stoicism isn’t just about positive thinking but also learning how to accept what we cannot change based on the past (such as our upbringing). It’s also, like cognitive behavioral therapy, about how to navigate stress, anxiety, depression in an unforgiving, unfair world. There’s something beautiful about learning to overcome both my own biggest struggles and also how to go about overcoming the world’s biggest challenges through the same philosophy.
I’ve recently been thinking about how there are so many facets in the world committed to reacting to things as opposed to working to prevent other things. Like we react to there being homeless people by criminalizing sleeping in public parks instead of making policy changes that seek to eliminate homelessness entirely. We react to issues that are the results of other issues instead of seeking to correct the root.
We do this with our loved ones too. We don’t focus on doing the right things out of pettiness or ego bullshit, instead waiting until the relationship has been irreparably harmed or when somebody dies. It isn’t until then that we give ourselves or the other person a little compassion and really seek to understand their plight. The consequence to swallowing our pride — having a bit of a bruised ego and not much else — can appear to be more intimidating than dealing with a deep regret.
Facebook — the company and social media site that I don’t particularly like — intentionally uses algorithms and strategies based in what’s called operant conditioning. You know operant conditioning if you’ve heard of Pavlov’s dogs. You know of it because you’ve been operantly conditioned; have you ever been in a store and heard somebody’s alarm go off? The same one you despise in the mornings? You know that feeling of dread you felt in your stomach? That’s operant conditioning; through repetitive stimuli exposure, our brain beings to unconsciously react to a stimulus and associates feelings experienced near the repeated stimulus. If you’re used to drinking your coffee on the porch every morning with the birds singing, you’ll start to associate one with the other.
Well today, a Facebook memory popped up. The picture was me, my sister Alyssa, my Nanna, and my Nonno. Losing those three people have been three of the most transformative, emotional experiences of my life. To see a photo of myself with those three people felt profound. This photo probably didn’t seem meaningful at all for me the first time I had seen it, but having not seen it since the deaths of my Nanna and sister, it slammed into me. Part of my exercise in not caring as much is that I try to prevent myself from romanticizing every little thing. I used to think romanticizing was good but maybe it’s causing undue stress. I have to try something because trying to wax poetic about every single little thing in my life has driven me to feel increasingly overwhelmed by every little thing since now I can’t just experience something since I’m worried about how I’m going to try to write some beautiful, life-changing prose about every little thing. Experiences have become fodder for my writing. I love writing and I love experiences, but I hate that.
I watched Seaspiracy last night. I think I was disappointed with it. I think there was a decent message and call to action in there, but upon first watch, I feel this documentary fell culprit to a single person’s story and how every detail was particularly relevant to a single person. I see the importance of telling a story that is relevant to the viewer’s life; if we can convince those watching this film to realize that the ruthless, perpetuated devastation to our oceans will one day intimately impact them, then maybe we can drive change from the bottom-up while simultaneously metaphorically cutting the head of the snake off by exposing upper-level corruption. But it felt too… cinematic. The downside of trying to make the viewer feel they are capable of making impactful change on something as seemingly insurmountable like cleaning the oceans is that we also allow the viewer to simply say Eh, seems like too much work. There needs to be a balance to this type of storytelling.
I’m going to ruminate a bit more on the documentary and then I’ll write something more in-depth up. I need to think about it, but for now, I do encourage to you give it a watch.
A better world is possible, I do believe that. Some days are tougher than others. Today was a tough day where I hated my brain quite a bit. I had to remind myself that I’m in the present and that some days are tougher than others and on those days, I just have to push through my finding whatever I can cling onto to remind me of the beauty of the world.
Today, it was Duncan wagging with excitement I got home.
tl