Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
Dear Matt,
As the news becomes more and more important, it’s becoming less and less important to me. I am losing the ability to care. Maybe I have a declining attention span, or am just overwhelmed. But should I care that I no longer care?
– Careless in Portland
Would that be Portland, Oregon, or Portland, Maine? Never mind, I don’t particularly care. Here at Ask Matt, we meet readers in whatever state they live, even if it’s The Great State of Disillusionment, Anhedonia, or Ennui.
Several years ago, I was following Arnold Schwarzenegger around in his bid to become the first, and probably last, Austrian-born bodybuilding governor of California. As I did so, one of his press wranglers, Todd Harris, said something I’ve never quite forgotten—an unusual occurrence with a political flack, since most of what they say is utterly forgettable or untrue, and usually both. While Arnold’s alleged sexual-harassment victims were coming out of the woodwork at every campaign stop, Harris went into crisis-management mode. He distracted parched reporters with cold beers on the press bus (this was back in 2003, when reporters still had time for alcohol abuse, since they were not yet filing 12 stories a day across multiple platforms, all while tending their social-media ego gardens). But he likewise attempted to keep us from nailing his candidate’s hide to the wall, amusing us with some of his stock press-secretary-isms. “Okay, this one’s my favorite!” he gloated. “’Off the record—‘yes’; on the record—‘no.’”
It was a joke, of course. (Also back in 2003, people still made jokes.) But the cynicism at the heart of the joke told a fuller, more honest truth than a straight answer ever could have. Life is full of seemingly self-cancelling dualisms. And it is in the spirit of Harris that I offer a dual answer to your question: No, you should not cease to care. Yes, you should care less about caring.
Lazy pundits like to upbraid the American public for Not Caring Enough. How else, they cluck, do you explain 46.9 percent of the electorate electing not to vote in 2016, in what was the most earth-moving, polarizing election of our lifetime? Whereas I say, good on half of America for at least pretending not to care. Always disallowed in these calculations is that some people didn’t care for either choice, and therefore didn’t care to grace inferior candidates with their vote. It’s not that they had no civic consciousness or were apathetic, it’s just that many of them cared more about their consciences than about looking like a Person Who Cares.
But of course, appearing to be a Person Who Cares is all most people care about these days. Don’t believe me? Spend two minutes on social media, or enter the comments section of any website, and all you will encounter is people who care wayyyy too much. About everything. About anything. All the time. They are caring sluts, and they deserve to be slut-shamed.
While it’s popular to blame news producers for the bad news we all wallow in, I don’t. (And not just because I’m a member of the media, and therefore, subscribe to self-justification/exculpation every chance I get.) Blaming the media for bringing the bad news is like blaming the sun for global warming or blaming a drug pusher for your drug habit. Yes, it is the sun’s job to produce warmth, and the media’s job to produce bad news (if you actually wanted to read good news, rest assured they’d make a lot more of it). But you don’t have to consume it, at least not in the quantities that most people do. And if you do, you’d do well to care a little less about it, or at least to be more discriminatory about what you take the time to care about.
While I have often bashed Donald J. Trump—partly for sport and because it’s easy, mostly because he’s deserved it—I will give him this: He is an exercise in self-betterment. Not for any discipline he exerts—he’s Donald Trump, so he doesn’t have any. Discipline does not factor into the brand. But rather, like some sort of unwitting lifestyle guru, he can teach one patience and how to take the longer view. Because whatever you think you’re outraged about today? Just wait until tomorrow. He’ll create a new outrage. You think you’re pissed about him comparing button-sizes, like a 12-year-old boy dressing out for gym class, with Kim Jong-un? The latter of whom is so fat, he probably hasn’t seen his button since the early aughts. (Which, come to think of it, is a rather Trump-like thing for me to say. Sorry—he rubs off.) Then just wait until he calls Haiti a “shithole,” or calls political opponents who won’t applaud his speeches “treasonous,” or whatever else he’s cooking up right now, that will shortly become the outrage of tomorrow, but then will be supplanted by the outrage of later that same afternoon.
My aim here isn’t to excuse Trump for his conduct. Or to “normalize” him, in the annoying current parlance. His personal behavior, wherever you stand on the issues (and I often have plenty of intersection with him on the issues, for however long he sticks to them, anyway), is what could readily be classified as serially abominable. My point is to say we’d all do well to plug into the Tao of Trump: Why get so wrapped around the axle of the outrage of the day, when we know full-well that there will be new outrages of tomorrow? Pace yourselves. And that doesn’t just apply to Trump news, but to all news—the latter of which is what we’re really talking about. It is possible to care too much. To live and die on the hill of every news cycle. So that no outrage-of-the-day has a chance to become the outrage-of-the-week, or of the month. We ought to allow the outrages to breathe a little, to find their natural level and proper context.
One of our very real crises of the day is that every crisis becomes the crisis of the day, or more likely, the crisis of the news cycle, which no longer even lasts for an entire day. And what we are losing, with the pervasiveness of our outrage, is the ability to distinguish between manufactured outrages and real ones. The wheat becomes the chaff, and the chaff becomes the wheat. Everyone rages about all outrages, all the time. Everyone is outraged about everything, and they now have the instant tools at their disposal to amplify their outrage, creating an outrage echolalia. And so we’re becoming the news-consuming equivalent of fentanyl addicts who can no longer achieve a high after too many hits, yet who are perpetually on the verge of a fatal overdose.
So we seek out quantity over quality, as quantity is always more easily had. Forget child hunger, or modern slavery (yes, there are still an estimated 45.8 million people in 167 countries who live in actual slavery). In North Korea, as this is written, and as the kabuki theater of Kim Jong-un’s cheerleaders captures headlines at the Olympics in Pyeongchang, 200,000 innocent people (at least) are being held in prison camps. People being starved, being tortured; children are being executed for the “sins” of their grandparents. And yet we fall on our respective outrage swords, instead, over lab-hatched faux controversies: NFL kneelers, diversity at the Oscars, liberal media bias. I do it, too. Almost nobody’s clean.
Real people are really hurting, all over the world, and here at home, as well. And yet, The People Who Care are, by and large, more interested in crafting artful put-downs of people who don’t care about the things they care about, in the hopes of garnering that most coveted of humanitarian prizes: lots of retweets. Make no mistake. This is not caring. It’s preening. Which is why you should care less about Caring® that doesn’t really matter, and try caring more about caring that does. Care about things that can actually make an appreciable difference: Strive to raise good-hearted children, giving them the tools to make the world better than the one they were born into. Help those who can’t help themselves. Love your neighbor as yourself.
These precepts are so gloriously simple, they will strike some as candy-assed and offensively naive. And yet … try them. Execution-wise, they are eternally difficult. Express any of these sentiments, and they will likely not garner you retweets, or the blue check of validation. They could even earn you scorn. But in a world that care forgot, they might be all that’s worth caring about.
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
