When did we stop caring?

[Miss Yu]

Sometimes I wonder....why did we stop caring for things? This stupid phrase "I don't care", I hear it everywhere. I wonder if it's really not caring or simply an emotional shield that people are hiding behind? Why do we get reminded that family is important if it really is like that. Do we care about other people or bombarded by stress, work, personal issues we become numb to caring. I find sometimes that I'm becoming emotionally numb and it's easier not to care or pretend that that's the case...
Any thoughts on that?

[cdn2wheeler]

It's likely both, in varying degrees, in different people. There are some that, for whatever reason, really don't give a rip. (For an exceptional treatise on the subject of psychopaths and how the world of business rewards their psychopathic behaviour, see Robert Hare's book Snakes in Suits.)

Then there are some who put on a mask of indifference to shield themselves from their own conscience.

As well, given the profoundly negative images of the world that we are avalanched with on a daily basis, we must become numbed to a certain degree. Otherwise we'd collapse into a heap of gibbering tears. And what good is that?

[Rose of Cairo]

There are certainly people using indifference as an emotional shield to hide behind. In the past I thought this was the only explanation for "I don't care". But now I know there are people who really don't care. My bf for example really does not care at all about a lot of things like people dying or suffering. As long as he doesn't know them, it doesn't mean anything for him. He's able to watch pics of a terrible car accident, with arms and legs lying on the road and half heads hanging out of the car window and say "oh this intestin lying on the road reminds me of sausage. Is there any left? I'm hungry." and go to the fridge to eat the sausage while watching those pics and wondering how fast the car must have been so that this leg was cut off and rolled to the place it's lying. He really does not care. He's not evil, he has just plain zero empathy. Maybe how much we care is a function of our empathy ability?

I noticed that we also say "I don't care" to express that we refuse to take responsibility for something, for example for the feelings of someone else. It's not that we really don't care, it's more a manner to say "I am not responsible for that, that's not my problem".

cdn2wheeler: we're not forced to let those negative images of the world into our lives...