Choosing to Care

The Paradox of Choice is that being given more options isn’t always better.

Choosing among a hundred different brands of toothpaste or peanut butter can take a long time.

And the difference between most brands is very little.

Which means the marginal benefit – the additional benefit you’d get from picking the first one that seems decent v/s searching diligently for the best among all options – is very little.

But the time you’d have to invest to find the best of the whole lot is a lot more, as compared to selecting the first thing that gets the job done. Not to mention the effort of comparing so many options.

It comes down to this:

You have a finite amount of time and energy, and you’re always bombarded with people and events clamoring for them.

There’s always something happening.

You have to “choose” what matters.

This is the real paradox of choice we face all the time.

And I think the truth is that very little matters.

Most things go into the “irrelevant” bucket, which is much bigger than the “relevant” bucket.

It’s pretty obvious, because if it wasn’t so, you’d quickly find yourself overwhelmed with data and things.

You could be reading about orcas, or going through the Illiad, or engrossed in whatever you see in the paper – from the news in Afghanistan to politics or sports or any celebrity’s personal life.

Or even things in your own life – your job, studies, sports, hobbies, friends, family, finances, chores – the list is endless.

If you know what matters to you, you can give more of your life to that.

And if you’re aware of what doesn’t matter, and keep it in your mind, you can do your best to ensure that those things don’t steal your life more than they have to.

Caring

Money is finite.

You might want a car, a house, a laptop, and fifty more things, but there’s a limit to how much money you have (currently).

Time is finite.

You might want to visit Jerusalem and take up an online course and read more books and learn a new skill and play a sport – but there’s a limit to how much time you have.

And just the same, there’s a limit to how much you can care.

It’s a very simple yet powerful idea, one I try to keep in mind all the time, more than anything else.

(The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson is probably about this idea, though I can’t be sure, because I couldn’t bring myself to go through the whole book. I’ll apply a censor in my essay, not because of any taboo but because I’m not interested in the off-chance of being misinterpreted by someone who doesn’t bother to read the thing).

There’s a limit to the number of ***** you can give.

Some might have a hundred, some might have only ten, but it’s still very limited.

So you can choose to spread yourself thin and distribute them freely on everything that comes your way.

Or you can hoard them and concentrate them on what matters to you.

If you have a hundred ***** in you, maybe you give one each to a hundred things.

Or you give fifty each to just two, or even everything to just one.

It’s the difference between choosing to care a little about a lot, or to care a lot about a little.

If you care a little about a lot, you’ll pursue a lot of things, though you’ll be unlikely to really contribute significantly in any one.

That’s not a problem either, because if you only care a little, you won’t mind not being able to achieve anything; there are plenty of other things on your plate.

If you care a lot about a little, you’ll “miss out” on many things. And you still might not achieve anything either, because there’s no guarantee of that – anything great is unlikely to be that easy or certain.

But it probably won’t feel like “missing out” or “sacrifice” if you really care about whatever you’re doing.

In either case, you should know that everything has an opportunity cost. There’s always something else you could have been doing instead of whatever it is you’re doing now.

Every hour you learn the piano is an hour you could spend playing football.

The money you spend on buying books is the money you could have spent on buying a PlayStation.

So every **** you give to something is a **** you could have given somewhere else.

Cause for pressure? I don’t think so.

It’s stupid to let this paralyze you into never acting, always looking for “the best” thing to spend your time and money.

That’s just one more way to spend your time, and probably not a very good one.

Instead, it’s a reason to use your ***** responsibly, to value them and hold them to a high standard.

To remember to not let them go to waste because they’re limited.

(Dunbar’s Number suggests that there’s a limit (~150) to how many real stable social relationships we can maintain. Intuitively it seems correct, which is why it might help to apply the same idea to choose whom you befriend)

The Caring Test

So what does matter?

Anything that passes your tests.

Very little does.

I used to think my test should be: Does this affect me?

It’s safe to say that a tiny fraction of the things going on around you will actually, significantly affect you.

But I changed that to a different one: Do I care?

Do I care? is a better question than Does this affect me? for several reasons.

Caring is Being Affected

When the test is Does this affect me? there’s no reason to look at anything not directly connected with you.

Following a celebrity is pointless – you’re obsessing about someone who doesn’t even know you exist.

Many people might still agree with this; I do as well, but I don’t consider it a guiding rule for humanity.

Lots of things don’t seem to affect you, but you might still care about them.

And that means they do affect you, so the answer to that question changes, and then it might matter to you.

When the test is Does this affect me? there’s no reason to look at anything not directly connected with you.

Now we come to the other side of the coin.

There’s no reason to care about the “big picture” – issues like racism, environmental change, poverty and so on – things you can do nothing much about.

As long as you do your best to ensure it doesn’t affect you too much, you’d be fine.

This is also a very reasonable course of action, but just as before, hardly a principle to be applied to everyone.

If everyone acted on the principle that what didn’t affect them was irrelevant, there wouldn’t be people like Raoul Wallenberg or Witold Pilecki or Abdul Sattar Edhi and countless others who did what most people would find completely “irrational”.

Again, they cared, so it did affect them, and so it did matter to them.

The converse is also true.

Many things might affect you, but you might not care about them.

Like a friend bitching about you or someone talking rudely to you.

If something affects you but you don’t care about it – then it’s easy to ignore it, almost as though it didn’t affect you.

Then why would it matter?

Hierarchy

So what matters most?

I’d always put what you care about above everything else.

It’s hard to say what matters more in this group:

1. Things you care about that affect you
2. Things you care about that don’t affect you.

If you’re hard headed, you’ll say 1 should.

Most of us care about not starving to death, and food prices / employment / housing all affect us – without the basics you could never think about anything else.

But it’s also true that many people seem to care a lot about things that don’t “affect” them, even to the point of giving their lives for them.

Think of journalists or humanitarian workers in war-torn areas who could easily find other ways to make a living – they choose what they’re doing.

It’s equally true that we care a lot about things that don’t “affect” us – like celebrities or history or fiction or sports teams.

Whether it’s “good” or “bad” depends on you – and you can only speak for yourself, because you can only spend your own *****.

You might be tempted to preach to avoid “wasting” time on those things.

But what other people care about probably is something you don’t care about and something that doesn’t affect you, so it’s usually a good idea to ignore it.

This is the last in the hierarchy – things that you don’t care about, that don’t affect you.

Slightly above this, but much below what you care about, are things that affect you, but you still might not care about.

Someone lies to you, or something goes wrong at work – it’s up to you to choose how you respond; you always have that choice.

Mistakes

Caring too much

Sometimes you give too much to something that wasn’t worth it.

It’s like getting worked up about a petty insult or imaginary sleight and letting it have power over you.

The Poison Tree is about a guy like that, who wasted years of his life plotting revenge.

That’s why forgiveness is freedom.

Or you can end up sacrificing your life for an obsession and cutting everything else out, only to end up regretting it.

Caring too little

I guess the opposite can hold as well.

You take something or someone for granted, and only realize how much they were worth when they’re gone.

Or you don’t put in effort in something, and it goes wrong, and then you realize you should have cared more.

Caring about the wrong thing.

There’s a very fine distinction between “caring about the wrong thing” and “caring too much”.

If you care about the wrong thing, you already care too much.

You could argue they’re the same, but I’ll make a distinction anyway.

Caring too much is when you do care, but you care more than something is worth to you.

It could be people obsessing about every calorie they consume, or fighting for every little mark in college.

Their grades, and their fitness matter to them – but what they’re doing is actually inefficient and hindering them from better results.

They spend so many ***** on something that gives them so little.

So they’re not wrong per se, but there’s a good chance they might think so with hindsight – unless they consciously prefer it this way.

Caring about the wrong thing, on the other hand, is caring about something you don’t really care about at all.

It might be obsessing about conspiracy theories.

Or spending hours defending or criticizing people who don’t know you in arguments online with people whom you don’t know.

Or obsessing about other people – how much they score, how much they earn, who they hang out with etc.

Maybe some people genuinely care about these things.

Or maybe they’ve just never thought about why they care, and if they did they might find that they don’t really care.

Disclaimer

I’m using the words “wrong”, “too much”, “too little” very loosely.

I don’t think anyone can tell you “you care too much / too little” or “you care about the wrong thing”. Certainly not me.

That’s why I’ve not said anything about what you should care about.

Because what others choose to spend their ***** on is their prerogative; I’m no one to preach.

And what others choose to spend their ***** on is not something I’d want to spend my ***** on either.

It’s something you have to decide for yourself.

And it’s something you have to keep thinking about, because often what seems worth caring about today doesn’t seem all that important tomorrow; and something unimportant today becomes all-important tomorrow.

But it’s worth seeing where your ***** are going, and not handing them out freely to everyone and everything without asking yourself if it’s worth it.