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Comment by ekanes | Hacker News Reader

I think no matter how one gets to this perspective, it’s the only way out. We must care less, because if we care too much, we can’t handle it and we fall apart. Humans aren’t built to live with constant fear and stress.

Of course that needs to be balanced, (eg with the environment) we have to care enough to act, but not be so attached as to lose our grounding.

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Be careful. There is a school of thought that equates this form of apathy or indifference to complicity with the greatest of societal evils.

We always have attachments; the question is whether we've been guided into pragmatically useful ones. "Care more about everything" as a rallying cry is simply anxiety-inducing; too many of these things aren't within our control, in the Stoic sense. And in the way it's usually used, it comes with an implied political angle: care more about this group, not that one. This person should be deserving of access to resources, not that one. Always trust these people, not those people. And so on; a scramble to establish and normalize an order within society that positions groups A, B, and C in their "correct" spot, manipulating their identities into victims, heroes, or villains as necessary.

But the good actually comes from a place of strength. Carefully saving and deploying your own energy, willpower and resources allows you to contribute while protecting you from getting sucked into an impoverished state yourself. That kind of thing thing has very little to do with the political order, and a lot to do with personal conduct. And it's much harder to be taught personal conduct of this sort than to fall into some group identity; to be met with the messaging of A over B each day and say not "that's right, go get em!" but "I can't focus on this, I have to tend to my own affairs" while actually applying virtue to your affairs.

Extraordinarily vague rationale used to caution one away from a positive mental health. I’ll pass.

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