emotional (dis)investment

Having someone care about you makes you want to give a shit, especially if you’re having trouble caring about yourself.

“You have to love life before you can care about anything,” she writes. “One must be enamored with existence and occasionally even enchanted in the face of it,” she adds, “in order to be capable of donating some of one’s scarce mortal resources to the service of others.”

Care is what creates the possibility of purposeful action. Care is what issues forth in meaningful knowledge of the world and others. Care is ultimately what transforms the quality of our involvement and engagement with the world so that we pass from “getting things done” to living.

widespread, insidious shifts in how we experience each other face to face, not just in our most intimate relationships but also in our communities and public spaces

Nevertheless, we need to keep showing our vulnerable hearts to each other. The stakes are enormous. We need more chances to connect and bond with each other in public. We need reminders that total control and complete divestment from others isn’t possible and it certainly isn’t desirable. We need to learn how to forgive each other and reassure each

The negative side effects from this new way of living are too countless to list. We don’t have the patience for anything, let alone the slow unfolding of human emotion. Ask anyone on a dating app how that looks up close, how it plays out over time. Pundits lament that the global populace is enduring a plague of psychobabble that adds up to

These phenomena aren’t matters of indifference or bad taste. This is what arises from our increasingly unnatural experience of community, of culture, of public life, of identity, of bodies in space.