I Am Jack’s Broken Heart

(In this premium post I talk about caring. Wait! Stick with me. I promise this will be more interesting and more unexpected than you expect. I don’t want to give too much away, but there will be talk of Kanye West, Katrina, Kurt Cobain, Epstein Island, Jordan vs Rodman, and moody CEO’s.)

Do you care? Do you really care?

My word for the year (do other people have those too?) is “caring”, and when it popped into my head in late December, my first reaction was “oh shit”. This may be even worse than my word of the year for 2020, which was “anger”, and boy did 2020 involve a lot of anger and the management thereof.

What’s actually wrong with caring, though? Why would that word worry me even more than anger?

To answer that, let’s begin with an observation that hopefully rings true to you: We live in a world where the appropriate levels of caring about various things are thoroughly political, and outright weaponized at times. This seems both normal and pathological to me because I grew up in a left-wing household where arguments about abstract principles were considered subordinate to sob-stories and appropriately empathetic response, especially when it came to policy. One good story of abused workers was worth a thousand ironclad arguments about why letting bureaucrats regulate the workplace is a terrible idea. Within this framework, caring was pre-sold as equivalent to the desired policy prescription — anyone who didn’t agree that OSHA was needed must not have heard the story about the guy who got his arm crushed in a machine after working for 12 hours straight. Or else they were an evil monster who cared more about corporate profits than worker’s welfare.