Trying Not to Care

In a good way

Sunday is my favorite day of the week. It’s an unpopular choice, I know, but I love it for its challenge and its potential. If you just don’t think about how you have work tomorrow, if you can manage to put it out of your mind, Sunday is magic. On the particular Sunday I have in mind, the most recent one, I was making my way downtown for dinner when it started raining. 

First it was kind of inconsequential—the type of rain that makes you feel a bit silly for opening your umbrella. In the time that it took me to walk one city block though, the sky opened up. People were scrambling for shelter, squealing and hollering and ineffectually holding their arms over their heads. I walked on with a smile and what I like to imagine as a skip in my step. I was in a lucky position: I had shelter in the form of my umbrella, and I also didn’t care if I got wet.

There’s nothing quite like the sound of heavy, heavy rain when you’re outside to really hear it. When it’s loud enough on the sidewalk or the umbrella over your head, that you can feel the vibrations. Like fireworks. I momentarily wished that I had forgotten an umbrella. I fantasized about showing up to dinner wet as a rat and shrugging my shoulders with a wink, “It started pouring, and I had no umbrella, so I just walked through it.” 

I have always loved a summer rain, and I have been known, on occasion, to intentionally walk through one. It wouldn’t be entirely out of character for me to do so, even on my way to dinner. But what would I do with my umbrella, which I had actually borrowed from my sister? Give it to someone else? I wish I had thought of that at the time. According to the universal law of umbrellas, I’m pretty sure that would have made me a saint or something.

I kept the umbrella overhead (but in a way that said, “I don’t mind getting a little wet”), and I started to get philosophical. Why were people running from the rain? Why do I always feel desperate to get into it? There’s a magnetic pull for me. If I’m sitting on the porch, I end up sticking my arm out over the edge. Once I have a taste—the feel of the drops on my skin—I’m done for. Out I creep, little by little or all at once. It doesn’t matter. I would probably even risk getting struck by lightening if no one was there to stop me. It’s intoxicating. As I walked, I wondered, and I think I figured it out too, so now I’m going to tell you.

It feels really, really good to not care. To not feel anxiety or worry, to not be concerned, to not attach importance where it has no business being attached. Rain in the winter is bad. You’re cold, and it’s cold. You’ll catch a cold and die. Rain in the summer is so good. It’s a gift. You’re hot and it’s at least a little bit colder. If you get soaked to the bone, you won’t catch a cold and die. You’ll be dry soon because it’s hot. You will come to no harm. I concede, it might ruin your hair, and I recognize I’m in a privileged position on that front too, but even if you’re not, it’s still a small price to pay for the freedom of not caring.

It occurred to me on my walk that if not caring feels really good, deciding not to care must be one of life’s greatest joys. I know that’s not a revolutionary thought, but hear me out. The reason I love summer rain so much is because it’s easy to make that decision. It doesn’t require the extra work that other things do. You see, not caring doesn’t come naturally to me. I care about pretty much everything—even small trivial things like loading the dishwasher ‘wrong,’ and being three minutes late and making an offhand comment that comes out wrong. In day-to-day life, I’m not the girl who shows up to dinner soaking wet, shrugging her shoulders with a twinkle in her eye. On and evening with a summer rain, though, I can be that girl without really having to try. It feels so good.

Perhaps strangely, or perhaps totally logically, the next thought that crossed my mind—still on my walk—was the fact that I do not want to download Threads. There are so many reasons, not least among them the Zuckerberg of it all, but I’ll spare you the in depth analysis that so many out there are already doing on why Threads is good or why it’s bad. The main reason I don’t want to download it is because I don’t like social media, and I know it’s not good for me. I’m not sanctimonious—let her without any of the apps on her phone throw the first stone—but the point stands.

There are the nice things about it, like seeing cute pictures of my friends, cute videos of other people’s pets, finding good recipes or cool under-the-radar ceramicists (for some reason my Instagram is all ceramicists right now). Those are the reasons I keep it. Unfortunately, there’s also the disappearing time, the comparison, the constant virtue signaling and people telling me I need to do something about this [insert injustice or catastrophe] right now or the world will end. Those are the reasons I keep deleting it. Those are the aspects of it that make me feel like I’m being pushed into caring about things that I don’t need to or shouldn’t care about. 

I don’t mean to be callous—I realize that social media is full of things worth caring about. The world is! Maybe I’m fragile and just can’t handle it, or maybe I’m not unique, and it’s actually not good for us, empathetic and naturally caring little beasts that we are, to be confronted with a constant deluge of things we should care about but that are out of our control. That’s thinking on the global level. On a smaller level, caring about what people we barely know are doing—where they’re on vacation, or the house they just bought, or whatever—is also not good. Even if you try there’s no way to avoid the stuff—the apps are literally designed to shove it in your face.

I’m not on Threads, so I can’t say for sure that it’s like that, but if every other social media platform is any indication, it is or it will be. Regardless, I am electing to just avoid the whole kit and caboodle—because guess what? One of the very best things you can give yourself permission to not care about is social media! Maybe some of you are nodding along like, yeah Eve, the rest of us know that. Well, for me, and maybe some of the rest of you, it doesn’t come naturally. That’s why I’m writing about it, I guess. It certainly doesn’t come as naturally as running around carelessly in summer rain does, but not adding another platform seems like a good step in the right direction.

Of course, I feel I must also mention that I’m not trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I like caring. In the broad sense, the capacity for caring about things that don’t directly impact or relate to us is what makes us human and what makes us good. In a narrower sense, caring is a massive part of my personality—and not just in that I try to be kind and loving to my friends and family, and other people too. I am caring in the sense that I grant importance that is sometimes inflated to all kinds of tiny little things. It’s one of my favorite things about myself. It makes me reliable, and thoughtful.

The point is not to do away with caring entirely, it is to realize that not all things warrant caring about. It’s about identifying things in your life that are easy to not care about—like getting wet in the summer rain, or another social media app—and letting go of those things. Then with practice, it might get easier to apply that same carefree attitude to other things. Things that have, by whatever means, acquired an air of importance in your mind that is not their due. Pick something not to care about, and feel the tingling satisfaction, the childlike giddiness, spread through you. You could even start this weekend by deciding not to care about (or even think about) your work week on Sunday. See what I did there!?

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As a bonus, my favorite poem ever is about the interplay between our desire for freedom from care and our love and care for the things that bind us. Here it is:

“The Silken Tent”
Robert Frost

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when a sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all it’s ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And it’s supporting central pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To everything on earth the compass round,
And only by one’s going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.