A critique on the 'Not Caring About The World' trope

The inception of COVID-19 blocked not only the borders around me but also my unfettered inquisitiveness to know about the world. As every news regarding the rise in infections and death toiled my brain, I started to find myself more overwhelmed with any tragedy or updates in the world. I stopped reading news, articles, and podcasts as I used to and I rarely cared about what was happening with anything. 

My rationale was simple, and I believe it still holds true for me. At this point, the world was too huge for me to care about because I knew that I barely had any power to change it. Phrases like ‘Ignorance is Bliss’ resonated harder than ever and my conception of a better life became that as an owl(a latokosheko) — blissfully unaware of its unawareness. These thought-trains flowed to questioning the credibility of morality and losing hope after realizing how unfair, chaotic, and immoral the world was.  

The availability of other sides provided me with much-needed perspectives of how a small contribution could help make a bigger impact in the larger world. For instance, I cannot change situations of poverty but can walk instead of riding a bus to give that money to someone who can buy food for that day and not sleep hungry. The goal was to invest my energy into things I can affect or get affected by. 

However, I want to ponder upon whether seeing this rationale work out for me is a win.

My first disagreement comes with the foundations of why this thought holds important to me. I believe it is engrained with my prioritization of where I would like to invest my mental and physical energy instead of reading and knowing things. As a high school graduate, I felt the necessity to work on studying, preparing for colleges, and learning skills that would help my professional outreach and goals. However, it’s necessary to understand that these trade-offs of hyper-individualism over caring for the collective come from my vision of the world where I see that my personal incentive is to thrive and succeed under capitalism. Here, I can visibly see how a consumerist and materialistic culture consumes me into self-coercion for goals that are fundamentally selfish. While I don’t necessarily unsupport the culture, I think this incentive is curtailing us from our pursuit of truth and information

The cherry in the cake comes in when we understand that this decision isn’t merely out of personal incentives but more because we are puppets of the same systems we are forcing to be numb against. According to Karl Marx, cultural values are a reflection of the prevailing economic order. In a world where capitalism creates expectations and asymmetry over who gets them, I as the working class has to believe that I need to care for myself to survive and excel — i.e. my necessity to live becomes my incentive to work under capitalism, and while doing so, I need to sacrifice my curiosity of the world or stop ranting against the absurdity of unfairness that the world creates. The quintessential fusion of individual dignity and the imposed notion of material possession perniciously propagated by capitalistic structure, therefore, becomes ubiquitous and indistinguishable. And why not? I do get rewards set by these expectations when I work for them. This means, that the very systems that create these atrocities around us force us to not care about their atrocities because I have to work under the incentives that these very systems gaslighted me to accept as my own. 

My second disagreement comes from the very gravity of the issue. What is a cynical and stoic perception of the world leading us to? I believe it is harming the natural tendencies that we have. I like to believe that humans have conditioned themselves to be social animals. We feel bad when we see something sad, and a part of us always wants to step in and help. But, when we think the world to be too huge to care about, we are denying multiple feelings. I think emotions like sadness, anger, guilt, sympathy, goodwill, etc are innate and necessary. When we see the misery of the world, we do feel these emotions, and I believe even if we can’t change them, feeling these emotions, in general, is necessary because they connect us to the world around us. The contrary otherwise transcends to hyper-individualism where the pursuit of materialistic and consumerist gain distance us from the social genes we inherit. 

The implications are much beyond. With this as a narrative under a status-quo of hyper-competition, extreme isolation, and individual-pursuit, are we removing these emotions of sympathy, guilt, and anger from our systems collectively? Moreover, is this narrative of not owing to the misery of the world driving us into more isolation and extreme-individualism, and distancing us from the world?

The conclusion is, I don’t have a solution. I rather see it as a massive paradox. If I do want to get my life better, I need to care less about the world and focus on capitalism’s definition of success. But not caring leads to being manipulated and gaslighted on our incentives. 

So, are we really winning by not learning to care and accepting that you can never be a good human even if you try? Is the Not Caring About the World trope a tool to censor discourse and numb us to the ever-growing tragedies around us?