The Exhaustion of Caring
Like so many of my girlfriends d’une certaine âge, I have been tickled by the meteoric rise of the Instagram sensation known as the “We Do Not Care Club”. As Melani, the creator, begins each video, “The ‘We Do Not Care Club’ is for women in perimenopause and menopause who are putting the world on notice that they simply do not care anymore.”
After calling the meeting to order, she proceeds to list all the banal and superficial things society tells women we should concern ourselves with, like how our bodies present, the state of our housekeeping and the myriad social and professional pressures, real or imagined, under which we labor. It’s subversive, it’s fun, it’s liberating, and it’s comforting to know so many millions of women are sick of the same shit.
But the underlying power of the We Do Not Care Club is more radical. It lies in the implicit message that if we really do jettison all those energy-sapping wastes of time and attention, imagine what we could actually find capacity to care about. Namely, resuming the act of becoming that so many of us suspend when we take on responsibility for other people.
The exactly wrong interpretation of the success of the We Do Not Care movement is to take it literally. It’s not that we do not care; it’s that caring about the wrong things exacts too high a cost. Aging (and nothing forces you into confrontation with age quite like perimenopause) brings the hard-won gift of discernment about what deserves our care.
But man. The compassion fatigue is real.
In a world where it is increasingly exhausting if not outright dangerous to care, not caring, or insulating ourselves from care, can become a real temptation. Indifference, anhedonia, even depression can function not only as symptoms or conditions, but at times, as survival strategies.
Disclaimer: There are forms of depression that are disorganizing, brutal and life-threatening. They are not symbolic. They are not instructive. They are not gateways to any kind of wisdom or compassion. They are medical emergencies that demand care, protection, and treatment, full stop. To suggest otherwise would be cruel and very wrong.
I have experienced periods of profound clinical depression in my life. At my energetic best in these times, I could tell myself I was having a sane response to an insane world: as Krishnamurti said, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” At my worst, well, IYKYK - nothing.
I sought professional and pharmaceutical help. My best psychiatrist steered me to read about the ancient notion of acedia.
Acedia is a Greek term describing a condition of listlessness and aversion to meaning. It is defined by an erosion of care toward one’s commitments, vocation, or inner life. It is marked by restlessness, dissatisfaction, and the urge to abandon what once felt purposeful. Early Christian monks called it the "noonday demon", recognizing it not as laziness, but as a destabilizing crisis of the soul.
Introducing this notion puts me onto thin ice. I have no interest in arguing for any religion. Brooke Shields did have postpartum depression, and Tom Cruise can go f* himself. There are mental health conditions for which prayer and disciplined spiritual inquiry are no match. Again, I am pro-medicine and unapologetically anti-pain. Put your serotonin mask on first.
But…so many of us are suffering now that we’re all in trouble. What’s happening to our mental health is too widespread to be a massive coincidence of individual pathology. Even if your Maslowian needs are being met and you’re doing OK, the mental health care industry can’t keep up with the wave of burnout, numbness, depression and crisis we are experiencing. We have been framing these issues clinically. As a menopausal woman, I violently (insert lady-rage joke here) support medical interventions for hormonal imbalance and mood dysregulation.
And yet.
This malaise we are collectively experiencing may also be a crisis of meaning, a crisis of the soul. The kind of crisis characterized by a listless state in our minds and bodies that some wisdom traditions identified as acedia.
Our modern containers for despair may leave us impoverished when it comes to a vocabulary around spiritual crisis. The danger of this is that, at a loss for finding relief, we feel hopelessness and even personal failure. Like the old saying, depression is anger turned inward. So we race to symptom management, and why wouldn’t we? When your house is on fire, you turn on the hose. But if the source of the fire keeps delivering fuel, eventually you run out of water.
Wisdom traditions point us to inquiry as a hard path to more durable recovery. They ask us to consider if our discomfort might be asking something important of us. They encourage us to weather the “dark night of the soul”. Across cultures, there are stories of literal wrestling with stand-ins for the noonday demon: in Genesis, Jacob grapples through the night, emerging wounded but transformed. The Buddha is confronted by the discouraging demon Mara; the Buddha touches the earth and sits. Jesus endures 40 days in the desert without rescue. In all of these stories, the crisis is not immediately remedied, and meaning is wrested from the struggle.
In our secular, speedy, technological age, we rarely acknowledge metaphysical crisis outside of faith traditions, and we are not encouraged to look beyond science for the palliative. Suffering itself has no inherent meaning (Viktor Frankl), but understanding its nature may help us to respond to it meaningfully.
So it’s not that We Do Not Care. We care a lot. It’s excruciating to care a lot right now. That pain can drive us to a kind of madness. That madness is not always clinical. Our ancestors, without our vast stores of knowledge, were in many ways more wise about and intimate with the human condition than we are, because their lives did not insulate them from nature or from each other. We’ve lost some of the tools they had to meet acedia, as an invitation to inquiry, reckoning, and orientation, without shame or fear of failure or self-reproach.
The We Do Not Care Club is a threshold moment to reject nihilism, reject indifference, and sit with acedia as a teacher, to figure out how to keep compassion alive in a moment where so much is conspiring against it.
