At some point, caring about things became embarrassing. I don’t know exactly when we collectively decided this, but apparently the coolest person in the room is now the person who gives the fewest shits about anything. We’re all supposed to act vaguely unimpressed by everything, and if you get too excited about something, you need to immediately make a joke about yourself so everyone knows that you know you’re being a nerd.
You can’t just say, “I think this is really fucking cool.” It has to be prefaced with something like, “I know nobody cares, but…” or “This is probably stupid, but…” or the classic “Don’t judge me…” Why? I care. Judge away. Because I am absolutely the person who cares way too much about things, and the older I get, the less interested I am in pretending otherwise.
I Have Never Met a Rabbit Hole I Didn’t Like
I can start reading about one completely normal thing and, three hours later, find myself learning about something that has absolutely nothing to do with the original question. History is especially dangerous for me. I’ll read one sentence about some obscure event and immediately think, Wait. What the hell is that? That’s it. Night ruined. Now I need to know who was involved, why it happened, what happened afterward, and probably what some historian writing forty years later thought everyone else got wrong about it.
The same thing happens with space, technology, some random project I decided needed to exist, or basically anything else that manages to catch my attention. I’ve never really understood the idea of casually wondering about something. We have tiny computers in our pockets that give us access to an absolutely absurd amount of human knowledge. If I wonder why something happened, who somebody was, how something works, or whether some random fact I vaguely remember is actually true, I can just find out. So I do.
Sometimes that means spending two hours learning something that will provide absolutely no practical benefit to my life. I’m probably never going to need that information again. Nobody is going to quiz me on it. It isn’t going to make me money. It might not even come up in conversation. Worth it.
I like knowing things, but I think I like not knowing something and then finding out even more. There’s something incredibly satisfying about realizing there was this whole story, person, idea, or part of the world that existed five minutes ago without you knowing anything about it, and now you know a little more than you did before. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of that.
Please Tell Me About Your Weird Thing
I genuinely like people who are obsessed with something. You know the type. You accidentally mention trains and suddenly this person has entered a fugue state and is explaining the differences between locomotives manufactured in 1974 and 1976. Perfect. Keep going. I probably didn’t care about trains five minutes ago, but you care about trains, and now I’m interested because you’re interested.
There are people who know every statistic from their favorite sports team. There are people who can identify an airplane from a blurry photograph taken from six miles away. Some people can identify birds by sound. Some know an unreasonable amount about Star Trek. Others can explain some incredibly specific historical event that seventeen other people on Earth have heard of. I love those people because genuine enthusiasm is contagious. Watching someone’s entire personality light up because you accidentally mentioned their thing is one of my favorite kinds of conversation.
I will take that person every single time over someone whose entire personality is acting like everything is stupid. Being cynical isn’t the same thing as being interesting, and pretending not to care doesn’t make you cool. Most of the time, it just makes conversations really fucking boring.
This Isn’t Just About Hobbies
This is where I get a little more serious about it, because I think we’ve also gotten weird about caring about people, especially people who aren’t like us. You’ll see something terrible happening to another group of people and inevitably someone asks, “Why do you care?” I’ve never understood that question. What do you mean, why do I care? They’re people. That’s the whole answer.
I don’t need something to personally affect me before I’m allowed to think it’s wrong. I don’t need to have experienced someone’s exact life before I can believe they deserve to be treated fairly. I don’t need to share someone’s race, religion, nationality, gender, sexuality, politics, neighborhood, income, or anything else before I can look at them and recognize another human being. And I definitely don’t need to agree with somebody about everything before I care what happens to them.
There are plenty of things happening in this world that will probably never affect me personally, and I can still care about them. In fact, I think that’s kind of the point. It’s pretty easy to care about something once it affects you. Caring when it doesn’t is where it actually means something. Empathy shouldn’t require you to demonstrate that you have some personal stake in the outcome first.
That doesn’t mean I understand every person or every experience. I don’t. There are lives being lived that are so different from mine that I couldn’t possibly understand exactly what they feel like. But I can listen. I can learn. I can recognize when somebody is hurting. I can decide that another person’s dignity matters even when there’s absolutely nothing in it for me. None of that seems particularly radical to me. It just seems human.
I Am Wrong About Things
This one has taken me longer to get comfortable with: I’m wrong sometimes. Probably more often than I’d like to know. There are things I believed ten years ago that I don’t believe anymore, and there are things I believed five years ago that I don’t believe anymore. There are probably things I believe while writing this that Future Me is going to look back on and think, Jesus Christ, dude.
That’s fine. Or at least I’m trying to be fine with it. I don’t think changing your mind should be embarrassing. Changing your mind because you learned something new is literally how this is supposed to work. I would be much more concerned if I went through my entire life believing exactly the same things I believed when I was twenty. What would that say about everything I’ve learned since then?
I don’t want to spend my life defending something simply because Past Me happened to believe it first. If I’m wrong, I want to know. Now, am I going to immediately respond with, “Wow, thank you for correcting me. What a wonderful opportunity for personal growth”? Absolutely fucking not. I’m still a person. Give me five minutes. But eventually, yes. I’d rather find out I’m wrong than spend the rest of my life confidently being wrong.
There’s also something freeing about realizing you don’t have to have an opinion about everything immediately. Sometimes “I don’t know enough about that yet” is the correct answer. We seem to have lost some appreciation for that. Every event happens and within fifteen minutes everyone is expected to have a fully formed position on it. I’d rather take the time to understand something than rush to plant a flag somewhere and spend the next ten years defending it.
I Don’t Want to Stop Being Curious
That’s really what all of this comes down to. I don’t ever want to reach a point where I think I’ve learned enough. I don’t want to become the person who already has an opinion about everything and no longer feels the need to investigate any of it. I don’t want new information to feel threatening simply because it doesn’t fit neatly into something I already believe.
I want to keep asking questions. I want to keep finding weird things that fascinate me. I want to keep starting projects that are probably more complicated than they need to be. I want to keep meeting people who know things I don’t. I want somebody to mention something I’ve never heard of and have my immediate reaction be, Wait. What is that?
Because there is so much stuff out there. Thousands of years of recorded history and thousands more that we’re still trying to understand. An entire universe we’re only beginning to figure out. Billions of people experiencing lives completely different from mine. Books I haven’t read, places I haven’t been, ideas I haven’t considered, and things I don’t even know that I don’t know yet. The older I get and the more I learn, the more obvious it becomes how unbelievably little I actually know.
And I think that’s exciting.
Care Too Much
So be a nerd. Have the weird hobby. Know way too much about something. Get excited when someone asks you about it. Make something nobody asked you to make. Spend six hours researching a question that could have been answered with a three-sentence Google search. Read the Wikipedia article, click the blue link, then click another one, and wake up three hours later reading about the agricultural practices of a civilization you had never heard of before tonight.
Care about history and science and art. Care about your community. Care about something completely useless simply because it makes your brain happy. There doesn’t always need to be a productive reason for learning something, making something, or loving something. Sometimes “because I think it’s cool” is a perfectly good reason.
More importantly, care about people. Care about people you don’t understand. Care about people you’ll never meet. Care about things that don’t affect you personally. Care when there’s absolutely nothing in it for you. Ask questions, listen to people, learn something new, and be willing to admit when something you thought you understood turns out to be more complicated than you realized.
The world has enough people trying desperately to prove how little they care. They can have that competition.
I’d rather care too much.