Conscious Caring
Image by Brendan McCaughey/Renegade Creative Solutions
There is something that connects all politicians, businesses, activists, creative projects, and any other endeavors humans pursue. None of these things can exist or succeed without getting people to care about them.
An indifferent audience will not take action or support what they are indifferent towards. A passionate audience or group will take ample action for that which they care about.
This is nothing new. There are entire companies and legions of people who work to make people care through marketing ideas, brands, and campaigns. Their goal is to convert the average apathetic person into someone who actually cares about these ideas, brands, or campaigns. Many people already know that without others caring about what they’re working on, there is no future for it.
There are entire sciences of persuasion, positioning, and messaging that utilize various aspects of human psychology to begin the care cascade in others. It all starts with one reason.
All anybody needs is one reason that aligns with some part of their self-identity, or their group identity and they can begin to care about something. If the armies of social psychologists, marketers, and others vying to influence us can find one reason we should care about whatever it is that they are promoting — they can sink in a hook.
If this first hook is in, it can easily slip out and we can move on without really developing the level of care that would cause us to act. But, this first hook can help to position an entire net around us that can engulf us in myriad reasons to care.
If we are surrounded by numerous reasons to care, and several of them align with our self or group identity — then we have begun to become enmeshed and can likely become swept up in this new thing we care about.
Not all of this is malevolent or done with ill intent. Both noble causes and nefarious campaigns need us to care — and need to hook us, then surround us with reasons to care.
The challenge of getting other humans to care, and care at a sufficient level to take action has always been required for history’s shining achievements and tragic atrocities throughout time. When a large enough group of people care enough about something, they will act. Depending on what it is they care about, and what actions they take, the outcomes can be beneficial or brutal.
This is important to note in ourselves and others around us. We are being captivated, conjectured, and even coerced into caring about what other people want us to care about. If we do not have some level of conscious choice in what we care about we could be becoming part of a larger group heading to a disaster.
We all can only care about so many things at any meaningful level. Care is a finite resource. If we care about the wrong things we will not have the energy, focus, and time available to care about the right things.
Examples include:
Caring about the pursuit of pleasure instead of caring about our health.
Caring about what a celebrity is doing instead of planning for our own goals.
Caring about what others think of us instead of caring what we think of ourselves.
There is a powerful way to assess this process in action, and determine if what we care about is something that we should continue to allow to use this limited resource. We need to become conscious of what we care about and most importantly why.
Why is the secret question. Why do we care about this thing? We should not stop with the first answer we get, but follow the 5 Why’s Methodology, and go several layers deeper by asking why again and again until we uncover some deeper reasons.
Exploring our motives to this level of depth may reveal some hard truths. Perhaps, what we currently care about is not supported deeply by good reasons. Perhaps we get to the third why on an issue, and realize we do not have a good reason to care at the level that we do about something.
Or, perhaps we have 5 layers of depth on why we care about something, and they all align with our highest selves and a larger virtuous purpose. That would be the best possible outcome, but it is unlikely that everything we currently care about meets such criteria.
This can be an eye-opening exercise — to evaluate what we care about and why. Finding out something we have believed to be important to us was not supported by solid reasons below the surface can be both disappointing and liberating.
It is disappointing to think that we have invested our time and energy into something that we did not actually need to care about. It can also be liberating to realize that we can choose to stop caring about what is not important and is not supported by deep and strong reasons that are well understood.
Since we can only care about a finite number of things, realizing where we currently are allocating our care can help us tremendously to improve our lives and the lives of those around us. If we stopped caring about ourselves and neglected our own health and well-being, we can realize that and make a change.
If we started caring about what was happening in the news, or in a gossip publication instead of caring about our own lives, we can stop caring about these things. We can start caring about things that are of higher value to our everyday existence.
We are all assailed by people across all forms of media trying to get us to care about their brand, their books, their problems, their passions, and their products.
Many of these people are good and have brought something into the world worth caring about, something that truly benefits others. But, many of them don’t care about being good at all — they just care about getting people to care, act, and support whatever their self-motivated cause is.
Careful what you care about. Curate what you care about and care more consciously.
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This is the 92nd installment of Writing Wednesday. A commitment to myself to actually pursue my dreams of becoming a writer. I am resuming this practice to satisfy the creative needs of my soul.
I am a writer.
Let me know what you think, and follow my journey on Instagram/Twitter (@multitude27)
