The Dream of Not Caring

2025-07-02

I don't care. Please believe me in how little I care.

I'm back in my hometown and kinda depressed about it, so sorry for the mellowing.

Lately I've been bombarded online by people screaming at me; that they don't care. They don't care about the Gaza Genocide; Brett Cooper doesn't care about the potential morality of Jeff Bezos wedding in Venice; I shouldn't care about the ethics of colonialism. We should all just not care (read in the tone of internet screaming people use nowadays instead of an inside voice.) And there's something so bleak about living in a time of death and destruction and being told to work on not caring. I feel like we used to at least care about death and destruction.

Also, I don't necessarily believe all of these people don't care, but I do think they work themselves into not caring. I think it's an attitude, I think it's a discipline. For one because of all the screaming at me -- I've seen genuine not caring, like when you try to talk about analytical philosphy with people who aren't wrong in the head. Secondly, because humans just care. It's why we're easily baited and why anything that shines can grab out attention. Shutting your ears and screaming doesn't convince me you don't care. There's a dream of not caring but it's not a reality.

Back to Brett Cooper because I have an unhealthy obsession. I just find something so bleak about watching someone talk about celebrity gossip (kinda half heartedly tbh -- who's trying to revive celebrity gossip? Does this feel 2010 to anyone else? To straight people talk about this? Help), call Jeff Bezos wife gorgeous because of "meat" (does everything have to sound like an AI parody of american conservatism? was this written by a real human) and then yell "please keep the politics out of this, just let me scroll, just give me something to react to." Is this a real human beings feelings??? I don't care, just let me scroll? Not to use a big word, but this is why fascism is so nihilistic, or at least whetever breed we have of it today -- but I do suspect always. It's just the baby need inside us to not-care, to shut out, to prioritize our own interest and current desires, even if that desire is not feeling slight discomfort.

So much conservative content or the last decade has been lolcow-ing queer and progressive people, paradoxically putting a gianormous spotlight on people they think should be out of public life, giving the most annoying (according to them) feminist/fag the biggest plattform possible. If you've followed conservatives online, you've probably heard more extremely niche queer discourse than if you lived on the gayest city on planet earth. It's basically baiting yourself into being annoyed. I've always thought with this content that you could just *choose* not to consume it. Even if you believed the last decade has been an onslaught of progressive hell, you wouldn't have been the first one to decide mainstream culture is kind of stupid and done something else. But lately I think that the constant bambardment of annoying things, by people who are already sort of annoyed by women, gay people, people of color, etc., has been a build up to break their brains into just wanting "politics" out of public life, an artificial dial where a certain amount of political power was achieved and an artificial victory could be declared. Good job guys! Politics is out of public life. You can now go back to enjoying american culture, like

• rodeo
• doing manual labor we used to outsource to the global south
• believing daddy knows best when it comes to international warfare
• going to church
• scrolling
• getting into marriages with men that don't believe in divorce so you need WhatsApp groups that function like "Underground Railroad for women in the conservative movement"
• staying tuned for Sydney Sweeneys next boyfriend

I've always been too much of a Greta stan but I think about her crying talking about the fear she feels of lack of care towards Gaza. To me I think that's the biggest sign of losing -- when people don't care, and fail to see that as a moral failure, fail to see it not as a rational emotion but a Zone of Interest-esque choice to shut of uncomfortable human experiences. Sometimes things that are uncomfortable are TRUE!!! I wanted to end by doomposting that maybe climate change has already forced too many people into this psychological state of "not caring", shutting out already, but maybe I shouldn't, maybe I can't, because then I'm as big of an nihilistic idiot myself.∎