Post #33: Caring

2 June 2023

Caring gives color and meaning to our lives; its value is inestimable. But it still comes at a price, like everything else: the more invested we become emotionally, the more vulnerable we will also get, and the more inevitably we will be disappointed sometimes. To love in the ordinary way (which is not perfect, but not to be slighted either) is to get hurt sooner or later, and one of the foundational insights of pioneering psychology in the age of Freud and Adler was that even our most intimate connections (indeed especially they) can never be as harmonious as we would like, but must be inescapably ambivalent even if the love predominates, let us hope.

When the inevitable occurs and we get hurt and disappointed, we recoil and find ourselves tempted to withdraw altogether. No doubt a healthy instinct on some level, meant to protect and help us heal, but also dangerous when it is overdone, which can happen all too easily. Who has not sometimes wished, in the face of his own emotional soft spots, that he could convince himself to care less, or perhaps not at all—to become indifferent, or as Mark Manson puts it, not to give a f*ck? And it works, up to a point: Manson did not invent the modern Western Zen of the Shrug, Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski were there long before him. The approach should not, however, be mistaken for equanimity in the meditative sense, which is not about becoming indifferent in this manner, but on the contrary, about sharpening one’s sensitivities at the same time that one sheds, ever so slowly, the deep habit of blind reaction at a level of which we are, for the most part, not even aware.

If the indifference strategy might be called the low road to unburdening yourself, often at the expense of others, as the examples of Miller and Bukowski illustrate as vividly as anyone could ask (I mean their book personas, not necessarily their real lives), then a true equanimity practice—governed not by indifference but by such profound sympathy, compassion, and understanding that it can dissolve the boundaries between us—might be considered the high or royal road. The trouble is that the latter is incomparably steeper and rockier than the former, because it requires letting go at a much deeper level; now we don’t just need to take things less seriously and cultivate a lackadaisical attitude towards ourselves and others, we need to work on slowly eroding the self-centeredness that is almost the bedrock of our existence as evolutionary competitors and survivors. And this not in order to care less, but so that we might care more genuinely, only with less narrowness of personal attachment. Not for nothing does this immense project get described in the Buddhist scriptures as trying to rub away a mountain range with a handkerchief.

On the way to a better mode of being, it’s not always clear what kind of temperament you should prefer, either in yourself or in your companions. The ideal would be the person of refined sensitivity towards others who has also succeeded in overcoming the tendency towards egocentrism and overreaction that accompanies such a constitution almost as a matter of course; or else the more congenitally even-tempered person who has been able to hone his sensitivities and arrived at the same destination from the opposite direction. But such ideals tend to prove elusive day-to-day, and we may often need to content ourselves with the company (including our own) of the over-reactive on the one and the indolent on the other, while not judging too readily which is the greater impediment to progress or the worse endowment to have. Reactions can be intensely visible without therefore running especially deep, and all surface serenity may hide sleeping volcanoes all the more violent for being more heavily repressed, or at any rate better hidden from view. (I am not making the case for one against the other, just cautioning how unreliable external impressions can be—and not for the first time either.) In the end it’s the marks of unfeigned, unaffected love that count more than anything else. Which brings us right back to caring the right, the genuine, the less attached and more selfless way, understanding that we do not need to be perfect to be good, or good enough, and that the best can sometimes become the enemy of the better.

Grand spiritual ambitions (not to say pretensions) suffer from the same difficulties as their secular equivalents: they need to be delivered upon, not just claimed and proclaimed before others. And as in other, more worldly domains of endeavor, there is the cautionary example of the kind of person who cares about a cause—or better yet, some lofty abstraction (those don’t disappoint as easily as our neighbors and other harsh realities are bound to do)—but who cannot get along with a single human being, as Augie March says of that “sheer horse’s ass of a Jean-Jacques,” exiled Citizen Rousseau hiding his insufferable self away in the woods of Montmorency in order to dilate before the world on the best of governments and the most virtuous system of education. We all need to be careful that we do not allow ourselves to carried away by our high ideas to the detriment of our more ordinary connections. Thinking big has its place in life, who would deny it; but not at the expense of one’s ability to think small, please, which is just as important.

(This one goes to Matthew with best wishes for the future.)