As someone who works for a local government bureaucracy - not caring is a coping mechanism because if you let every sub-optimal thing bother you then you'd just burn out. Very few jobs are structured in a way that those directly involved can determine how things are done so there is no real value in caring about how long a process takes. Where people have some agency you might be surprised how much people do care even in relatively low paying bureaucratic jobs.
In a similar way, many of us walk past multiple homeless people every day. Do you not care about them? Well, in an abstract sense yes of course but as there's not a lot you can do about it right now you evolve an indifference to it.
Its ironic, because this dude doesn't seem to care enough to even the slightest bit of research to understand why any of these problems he highlights are the way they are, and lazily attributes everything to OTHER people not caring. LEDs last longer, are more energy efficient, and also reduce light pollution because they are more directional[1]. Took me 30 seconds to google. There are enormous design standards for designing bike lanes[2]. It is almost certainly the case the design of this intersection is dictated by these standards. But sure, just assume it's because everyone is stupid.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/streetlights-are-... [2] https://streetsillustrated.seattle.gov/design-standards/bicy...
> The McDonald's touch-screen self-order kiosk takes 27 clicks to get a meal. They try to up-sell you 3 times. Just let me pay for my fucking burger, Jesus Christ. The product manager, the programmer, the executives. None of these people care.
I was working in this space! And I got fired for refusing to work on more upsell features for clients like Coca Cola and such.
I don't want to work on adding fucking ADS into checkout. That is fucked up.
> Why does this ramp suck so much? For literally the exact same effort it took to build, it could have been built 10x better. Make the angle 20 degrees instead of 70. Put the ramp just after the sign instead of just before it. Make the far curb face sloped instead of vertical. Put some visual indication the lane ends 50 feet uphill. Why wasn't this done?
> Because the engineer who designed it and the managers at the department of transportation do not give a shit.
No the reasons are likely wholly political.
It's clear from the photo that doing the bike ramp better would require more space. It would require moving that street sign. It could require allocating less space to cars and more to sidewalk, pedestrians and cyclists. These are financial decisions and political decisions. Spending money on cyclists is a political lightning rod that special interest groups will fight at all costs to maintain the automobile oriented status quo. Spending money is aggressively fought at all costs in an effort to keep property taxes as low as possible.
Engineers and policy people are not lazy they are constrained by aggressive political special interest groups.
> These new lights objectively suck to anyone not driving.
hint hint.
It's almost as if the decisions are being made for car drivers and not pedestrians. This is a political choice driven by special interest groups that seek to preserve 1950s era thinking automobile dominated status quo.
The author assumes that everything sucks because everyone is lazy and stupid but the reality is everything sucks because it's massively underfunded.
As a physician who does care, I found it interesting that he chose to include doctors in this tirade but then patted himself on the back for squashing bugs quickly and feeling badly about having written buggy code. I know that there are outliers, but in meeting and working with literally hundreds of other physicians at this point in my career, I can count on one hand the doctors who truly do not care. And boy do we feel bad when we make a mistake.
Most of the government employees that work in the bureaucracy do care. They care a lot. The reason their "favorite" part of the job is "stability" or "job security" is because the pay usually sucks compared to industry, and the bullshit you have to put up with to avoid scandals, lawsuits, and corruption also sucks. Most of the civil servants I know stay in their jobs because they really do want to help people; they really do want to make their agencies or institutions more efficient and better.
100% of the people around me at work care.
I wish they didn't, because they're bad at their job and "them caring" puts them as a peer for experts and people who both care AND are competent/experienced via design by committee and inclusion. Their incompetency is explained away as "unique point of view."
So perhaps the entire piece is an exercise in overgeneralization, where you assume that everyone has a baseline amount of competency. That curb could have been designed by a very caring intern, who is awful at what they do. They were managed by someone who had 100 other deadlines that are more important. They care about that curb, but they care about 100 other things with more priority.
We're in the era of Good Enough.
I find it's an impossible thought experiment to judge doing 100 things Good Enough is better/worse than doing 1 thing perfectly and ignoring 99 other things. Add a token / currency to the mix, costs + returns on investment. And now you have something substantial to judge.
There is a massive difference between actively not caring and passively omitting attention.
Peppered into the diatribe is direct, aggressive, not caring. But that doesn't validate the general stance.
Make a consultancy called Caring Company that makes companies/products/projects more efficient at same or less cost.
My institution has hired multiple consultancies to fix structures and form new ones... the entropy of pay grade and how to prioritize thousands of tasks in parallel doesn't "get solved" because someone finds that some employee is just bad at what they do. And what do you do when you find you can only hire those employees because you don't pay enough for better, because your products' incomes don't match the skill level required?
> We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeats armies of people who don't care. For his many faults, you can't say the man doesn't care.
I fully expected that bit. Can't say I would agree in any way though. If anything, a perfect example of a person with way too much agency and executive power and way too little restraint and rationality. The perfect anti social candidate to not care but to want to appear to due to his own personal insecurities that the world now has to suffer for.
One thing that depresses me is how ugly our cities have become. Buildings that go up are designed with a total lack of aesthetic intention. In Seattle, ostensibly there is a design review committee for multifamily and commercial buildings, but it doesn't appear to have made the city look any better, and their 2025 goals include "streamlining the Design Review process to be quicker and less costly for applicants, and reducing the number of projects that are required to go through Design Review."
This is the committee that's supposed to care about this, and they don't. And the architects don't because they're not being paid to make a beautiful façade. And the developers don't because they want to finish construction as quickly and cheaply as possible. And the residents of the city don't care because they're apathetic about living in a beautiful environment.
What kills me though is that we travel to landmarks in New York City or Florence or wherever, and gawk at the beautifully-designed old buildings and charming plazas, and seem to lack the recognition that we could live in places just as beautiful if somebody cared.
It doesn't really have to cost much more. I used to live in a 20th century building originally built as a schoolhouse. The city architect, who was budget-constrained, still made a point of including decorative brickwork. 120 years later it was by far the most attractive building on the street.
This is a really uninformed article that comes off as just plain whiny. Taking the traffic curb example, it's entirely plausible that the person who designed that ramp isn't a cyclist, and didn't think about what it would actually be like to be a cyclist making that curve.
I hired a contractor once, who was a fantastic one. We were designing some changes to one of our rooms, and he had a proposal that would have made for some interesting, yet unfortunate corners in one of our rooms. It would have been more annoying and more expensive, but I don't think for one minute that it was because they didn't care.
They just didn't live in the space, they didn't spend enough time sitting in the problem to appreciate other solutions. I however had, and when I presented them with a cleaner solution, they ruminated on it for a bit and loved it. Saved a ton of time and money, and the end solution was better.
All it took was a conversation, and building a shared understanding of the needs and possibilities.
Everybody has a limit to their capacity To Care About Things. It's not fixed in stone, people can care about more things and more deeply, but at any given time it's essentially some finite capacity. A glass-half-empty mentality (like the author's) is to look at everything that people don't care about and despair, while a glass-half-full mentality is to look at everything people do care about and remain optimistic about our ability to inspire people to care more.
The classic needs ladder states that first you need to take care of yourself, only after which can you take care of your in-group, only after which can you take care of your out-group. A lot of the process of inspiring others is to first set a good personal example, then helping others in such a way that ascribes cultural value to paying it forward, i.e. to teach people to fish instead of giving them fish. Sadly, this culture had largely dissipated in a society where so many people first have so much trouble taking care of their own needs. But it can be restored, with some optimism and finding people who are receptive to it.
I really do not care but that is because the economy has incentivised me to get into work I don't care about. It is completely unprofitable to do things I do care about. So I don't do them. So everything I do do, I don't care about. Of course, I would hope if I was a doctor or sth where I really affected people's lives, I would care just for their sake if nothing else. But I'm a developer. It's really not that deep. Let me be an artist without me and my sick mother going homeless and I would actually care.
You could replace "they do not care" with "they are prevented from caring" or "they care about different things" to get a more empathetic take.
Designing entire cities on shoestring budgets and break-neck timelines prevents caring.
Choice of lighting requires caring about many factors, including longevity and efficiency. The fact that you would make a different tradeoff doesn't mean the person doesn't care.
Driving is a complex task. Watching for mergers while trying not to die in a crash is hard to do simultaneously.
I could go on, but the solution to these things is not to get weirdly mad at people who may have a perfectly good reason for their behavior (sometimes they don't).
Cities should be designed in close consultation with residents (not just whoever has the free time to show up to meetings). Humans shouldn't be forced to drive everywhere. Up-selling should be a consumer protection violation. Caring alone isn't enough if you care about the wrong things.
I've lived in Japan for a few months. I was about halfway through the article, thinking about how it seemed to be a counter-example, before the author called out Japan specifically.
For all the other differences in culture, the attribute of "People Actually Care" seems to have a huge impact on how pleasant a place it is to visit or live.
I don't know why it seems to be the case there. I don't know how to replicate it. I don't think it's magic. I've heard people bandy about the theory of cultural homogeneity. That might be a _factor_, but I doubt it's the full story.
I suspect if you dig into it, differences in economics are a major factor. In the US, it feels like caring is actively punished, economically. Caring is nice, but someone can only _afford_ to care if their other needs are met.
I also wonder if density is a major factor - not so much for the difference in economy of scale, but the difference of "if my physical space is incredibly constrained, I'm both more incentivized to keep it looking nice, and there's less of it to keep looking nice."
And, of course, it's not like Japan is some kind of otherworldly utopia. There's serious tradeoffs and differences, there's negatives compared to other countries. But it does seem like almost everyone, everywhere, just... puts in a bit more effort. Takes a little bit more time.
I totally agree with the article and the examples. Problem here in France is the same: many people do not care. I would not say it's a majority, but a minority is enough to ruin other people's lives.
I'm really annoyed by the noise. From the deafening motorbike engine in the street, to the idiot with his speaker vomitting rap music, to the neighbor having a party until 3AM, they do not care.
Why is that? Mostly because modern western civilizations promote a me-first culture. Look at these personal developpment books: it's mostly about caring for yourself, barely about the others. When it's about the others, it's to advance your interests.
We do not learn from infancy to put others' interests first. Basic principles and values like selflessness are taught NOWHERE. When a problem arises here in France, you get yet another law to restrict and punish. We should just teach peoples to care for others.
I'm longering for a world when people care, where people who are "lovers of themselves", "not open to any agreement, without self-control, without love of goodness" will have disappeared,
and where "there is more happiness in giving than there is in receiving", where this is applied: "All things, therefore, that you want men to do to you, you also must do to them", will be the standard.
> In Japan, you get the impression that everyone takes their job and role in society seriously. The median Japanese 7-11 clerk takes their job more seriously than the median US city bureaucrat.
My favorite example of this is how, if you visit 7-11 in Japan and an employee isn’t busy, or is busy but with an unimportant task, they will jump to open a cash register and check people out the second a queue forms. They will move as quickly as possible to clear the queue of people, seemingly aware that everyone has some place to be that isn’t a checkout line. It’s wonderful.
Man, I've been the engineer in situations like that bike lane and believe me, we care. Usually the engineers care. 99% of the time the contractor had some "value engineering" suggestions that the client was all too happy to take because it saved them a little money up front. As the engineer you can try to explain that it will be shitty, but they ... don't care.
Its worse than that. There is a logic to society, growth and scaling that involves accumulating obligations. This is like a gravity or a gang hivemind that due to scale inverts the value of bettering to the value of self-preservation of a corrupt society theatre. They dont want improvement but containment i.e. inhibition of creative destruction. What really gets me here is just how much people normalize lying.
When you know this (if you arent obligation enslaved) you can then just work orthogonally to the system to make something way better. In fact it kind of breaks reality for you.
I am the guy who cares or cared! I will bring lost lady back to care home. I will help a kid to find his lost key in the playground. I will start fixing technical debt in a product at work. While two first cases were naturally the right thing to do I didn’t expect anything. With technical debt I was stopped because I was wasting company’s resources. I observe in my diary, that I am turning into do not care type person. One can’t cary about every pothole in the world.
As an antidote to this, one thing I like to do is notice when something is subtly nice.
I've bumped into those little wobly plastic things making a narrow turn. Saved me from a scratch.
The lights in my apartment are arranged so its quick to turn them all off when walking out the door.
That sort of thing.
One of the best parts of living in society with as much specialization as we have is that everything usually has a lot of thought beind it. Sadly, that thought is often towards making it more extractive and not better for me. But when it does work out its such a lovely feeling. That someone out there did this gift for me and we will never meet but share this invisible connection.
> Have been to the DMV? It sucked? There is a human being whose job it is to be in charge of the DMV. They do not care that it sucks.
Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've actually never had a bad experience at the DMV here in Seattle. The staff have been efficient, fast, and friendly every time.
The author should really move to Japan if they’re so impressed. Then they’ll get to find out what things in Japan no-one gives a shit about, and the shine will wear off.
>The McDonald's touch-screen self-order kiosk takes 27 clicks to get a meal. They try to up-sell you 3 times. Just let me pay for my fucking burger, Jesus Christ. The product manager, the programmer, the executives. None of these people care.
The author could stop eating at McDonald's and send a message to the company with his behaviour. But he does not care.
>The guy on the hiking trail is playing his shitty EDM on his bluetooth speaker, ruining nature for everyone else. He does not care.
The author could ask the guy to turn off the music and make the hiking trail more pleasurable for everyone. But he does not care.
Et cetera. He cares for views on his blog so he writes on his blog.
I doubt people in Japan care more or less than anywhere else. They just buy into a different social contract, one where they believe that if you behave a certain way towards others, your life in turn will be better as well. Japan is right to discourage foreigners from moving and living there. Those sorts of social contracts only work when everyone is on the same page.
I recently spent some time in the ER in a criminally underfunded and understaffed public healthcare system. People in quite severe pain were languishing waiting their turn but the nurses went out of their way to show a semblance of care and humanity to the patients and even apologize to them when they didn't have to and weren't expected to. Maybe that overall situation shows that key people in the society or government don't care but clearly the frontline people still care. I choose to focus on them and do my little bit to make things around me a little bit better when maybe no one expects me to either.
This is cynical. There are a lot of people who do care. Consider that someone cared enough to build a bike lane in the first place. IMO life is hard for most people and as much as most would love to "care", they have to take care of themselves and their families first. The caring is focused where it is best applied.
I also don't think Elon would bother fixing a bike ramp or installing dog bag dispensers around his home(s). So if he does "care", it's not about things you care about.
Everyone cares, but:
- everyone has a different idea of what that means.
- many problems can't be solved by one person.
- caring has an opportunity cost.
- caring introduces liability.
- we live in a society.
Caring is a luxury, most people are just trying to survive.
Thank you to the author for putting the feeling I have had since years into words. It's not just the US that is this bad, it's also in Europe. Just looking at the COVID pandemic tells you all you need to know about countries where people care and where they don't care. Maybe the west emphasized individualism too much? See also: Communitarianism - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communitarianism
I'm so glad that someone else had the patience and articulation to write this article so that I didn't have to (as a personal venting exercise). My personal takeaway of the mutually shared frustrations in poor design has been apparent since maybe the 1990's onwards. It is very sad to see throwaway consumerism, permeate culture to the point where from an industrial design POV you need to buy vintage or ludicrously expensive appliances to have a beautiful and functional product that is also reliable. In the past decades, companies like Braun were able to bring beauty into the house, where now Temu disposables have taken their place.
I don’t think people don’t care, I think they have too much to do. Kids at home, too much work, and still barely making ends meet. Our society is set up to push people to the max, prioritizing quantity and “good enough” over quality. Most people do not have a career where spending 1% more time on a curb design instead of spending that time with their kids results in any more pay, much less the spare time to focus on craftsmanship for its own sake.
People do not care because they don’t want to suffer all the time they see some lack of effort. Even when there is 80% carers and 20% do-not-carers, 80% will suffer and go into the opposing group. It has upside-down-bowl stability.
I care. It's frustrating sometimes, but I still can't help myself.
Working with people that also care (and are empowered to do something about it) is the greatest thing. I've worked in several such teams over the years and it's absolutely awesome.
On the opposite side, working on a team that doesn't is the worst.
I've actually been reprimanded by middle managers for caring, because caring sometimes takes more time than planned, and an arbitrary internal deadline wasn't met. I've come to realize they do in fact care, just not about the software but only about their own promotion. And the core issue is that they don't actually know why their own deadlines and feature requirements exist, they just get them handed to them.
This is different when you work closer to and with a customer directly. They know exactly what's important and why they need X or Y. When someone actually has to deliver results and deal with the users, they are more invested in having a working system. Here, caring involves finding the "right" person (usually not the one in charge), talking to them and figuring out what they really need (not want) and how they're using the system.
In such a setting, caring and building stuff that truly works is also reflected in performance reviews as everyone including the customer is happy.
You really have to pick your battles. I've had to make some concessions myself: some stuff turns out to be more complicated or unclear than it is at first glance, and sometimes you really don't have and can't make time for it. And in really large companies, there are sometimes so many people involved that you often can't get the answers you need or access to the person you need. Or you end up at legal which is more often than not a dead end.
Mindfulness of others is a very rare trait.
but once you start accounting for what the other person is going through, none of these may look as bad as they are.
A person could've lost his dog and want to free his mind by working out and forgets to put the weights back! one time its fine! few times its OK! happens every day, someone has to intervene!
I set up a weekly auto-buy for a stock about a year ago with Cashapp.
I noticed the stock was way up today so I logged in to sell. Well, turns out the auto-buy has just... Not been firing... For a solid year. I have two purchases and then it stopped. It still says I have a weekly auto-buy set up, but I have not been charged.
In a just society, I would be owed my potential winnings for these unprocessed purchases, but having dealt with Cashapp support in the past I know damn well there's no way they're going to agree to that. I would be lucky to even catch the ear of a human being. It's sure as hell not worth taking them to court over a loss of maybe a couple hundred dollars at most.
The opaque and useless support of modern companies is literally in my eyes the worst part about the modern world. They quite literally do not care.
From skip-reading, this is not about motivation (intrinsic or otherwise) in general. This is about other people not caring about you, or what you care about.
I care a great deal about DevEx, and since no one else tends to care as much as I do, I can do good work for a few years, but then I'm worn out from fighting alone. I move on and hope things are more aligned somewhere else. Doesn't mean my co-workers are wrong for "not caring", just that I haven't found my peers.
The driver who doesn't let you into her lane perhaps cares deeply about not being late, again, to pick up her kids from daycare. Or her brother is about to do that stupid thing again, and if she doesn't try to stop him, she'll feel bad forever, again. Which lane you're in doesn't even register on her list.
I invite the author to work for a large corp or a government and try and improve things. The most supportive people for improvements will be your team. The least supportive will be the higher-level managers. And no, the Director of Transportation is not the real manager. That's the mayor or city council.
Why? They get measured on the sweeping stuff, by the broad demands, and the people who actually pay them (in money or votes).
A better bike ramp that involves user testing but involves a delay that pushes work into the next quarter, changing accounting? That's a problem. I've lived this scenario where user features got axed to ensure all work could be budgeted under a particular quarter. Or a sign? That costs money and also needs approval, perhaps from another department.
Oh, and you are improving one bike ramp? Can't do that without people complaining. Got to improve all of them. So that is now a multi-million dollar project.
In a large org, it often isn't clear who owns overall design control, if anyone.
Lights that are great for drivers but suck for everyone else? That's many things in most cities and that is because drivers are the most vocal (and often the largest) population. Drivers win on everything from parking to infrastructure spending and drivers will tell city council what's on their mind.
For the corporate software I worked on, many users hated it. Tons of complaints. Team agreed. Team created proposal to fix it. Team managers pitched it to those above for the broader roadmap. Management explicitly said they didn't want to waste time on UI as the people paying were not the same as the people using.
Never worked for the DMV, but know a guy who maintains some software for one. What's the priority? Cheap. Cheap, cheap, cheap. Nobody wants to fund the DMV. Nobody wants to pay for technological improvements for it. Nobody wants to pay for staffing. It is where small amounts get shaved off to pay for things people do care about. The guy in charge of the DMV is tasked with keeping costs low.
There must be a name for this bias. "Everyone else's stuff sucks but the reason my stuff sucks is because someone is keeping me from doing good work"
Other people are always the problem. It's like the anecdote that most people think they are better than average drivers. "L.A. has bad drivers, but not me. The quality of everyone's output is down, but not mine."
Ask an engineer why their code is bad and they blame past engineers or managers, ask past engineers and they blame time constraints, ask managers and they blame bad engineers, ask a CEO and they talk about boards and stock price
It's always really interesting to see.
In my experience it isn't individuals not caring as much as there is no one individual accountable for making these kind of decisions. Whomever designed the bike ramp probably followed a set of curb-and-ramp regulations set by some committee, thought they were stupid, but then remembered that the last time he pushed back it was a huge hassle and he got reprimanded by his boss. The committee people probably cared about the rules in general but didn't foresee all use cases and didn't make their rules flexible enough.
A McDonald's kiosk is a masterpiece of engineering perfectly designed to make as much money as possible. It's by no means lazily made or without afterthoughts or care. Every detail in the interface has was decided after tons of experiments and hours of meetings.
They do care a lot, but about the wrong thing.
That bike lane ending might be so because it forces you to slow down. You are not supposed to crash into unsuspecting pedestrians when the bike lane ends. You should actually stop and get off the bike at this point.
Thanks for complaining about McDonald's self service, which is truly dreadful and just gets worse (no I don't have the app, why would I want something you people made on my own phone, stop asking!).
Another "they don't care" is the TV screens that have the menu on in the background, that used to have menu and prices when you went up to order, and now display "cool animations" half the time so you can't read the menu while you're up there ordering and have to wait and look like an idiot for the menu to come back.
Sometimes people don’t care, but often they are just unaware because there is no mechanism for feedback to make its way to them after they have designed the thing. Whoever designed that bike ramp probably designed a thousand other road features, lives many miles away, and never communicates with the people that handle injury reports; he knows none of the visceral details that you see every day in your specific corner of the universe.
I agree with author's frustrations. So many things could be better if people cared and did the right thing.
Japan is indeed slightly better in this regard: the work culture emphasizes doing your job as well as you possibly can, no matter how menial the job is. That's why you'll so often see attention to little details, which makes life better for everyone. It is very noticeable on a daily basis.
It’s not a case of not caring, but rather caring about something else more. If you live in a country that emphasizes profit and watching out for self as priority then yeah you’re not going to get a whole lot of wholesome selfless community minded behavior.
It’s not really a fault of the individual but rather a necessary consequence of the collective priorities.
Why don't people care? Maybe because they can't anymore? Look at the skyrocking number of silent quitters, of people doing the bare minimum. Look at the perpetual doomposting from the media since around 2015. The world is in a perpetual decay, it's not a single bit the same as it was pre 9/11. The world most of us grew up in is lost.
So why care? If the past decade was nothing but disruption, change, disruption, change, why would anybody put in "constant" effort? Many still do, as I hear from the medical professions and those running the grid. But man, if those higher up the ranks won't start to listen to the friendly outcast from the bottom, things will become worse and worse. They either don't listen or they listen to the outcast that hates them. Both are ways to make the world worse.
In smaller communities, people care more. There is a reputation social cost associated with being a self-centered asshole when everyone knows each other. If one doesn't care about others, they'll soon find themselves excluded from social circles, not offered help when they need it, and similar.
This is not the case in large cities – show 1 million people you do not care for them and there are still millions that will treat you reasonably well, especially if you can make a nice first impression. In some way, this social environment optimizes for not caring.
This is why I spent 30 years living in large cities around the world and now moved to a relatively small town. And I couldn't be happier. Streets are tidy, the town administration fixes most known problems, the public spaces are refurbished and the parks are maintained, businesses are pleasant, and everyone is friendly – I think I could ask for a favor from my taxi driver and they'd probably try to help.
There is a list of grifters we all know and keep in our heads, and I don't think the community will ever do them any favors. That is justice – these people wouldn't do anything for the community, too. And this list happens naturally in small places – you know the character of those around you. Reputation for having good character has social value. And this is natural.
Don't let the bastards grind you down.
> We have examples like Elon who, through sheer force of will, defeats armies of people who don't care.
The interesting part of this article and the comments this site have produced is this statement and the fact you’ve all either ignored it or just accepted it as fact.
You’re all part of the problem.
Why should someone working at big tech care? Their mission is , generally , to 'capture value' from elsewhere and in the process make the world worse. Hard mission to get behind.
And why should a 7/11 worker care? Their employer doesn't care about them. Minimum wage / minimum effort and all that.
And Elon Musk as the sole positive example is so lame.
All this bothers me because despite everything I do still care. But finding a way to express that is so hard. And after a while of it not mattering its hard to justify. And finding somewhere where your work actually matters seems impossible when we're funding everything except what's important
You know who really cares? The Karen in the HOA who relentlessly hounds the board because one of the units in the complex has the wrong color paint on their door. Be careful what you wish for, or the grass is always greener.
I find that caring, and networking with other people who care, at work can be a huge career boost in the long term. So I'm not even sure the not-caring people are winning, long term, but maybe they also don't can't about that.
I admit the article is rather whiny but it did resonate a bit with me.
A good example - we are provided free Keurig cups at work. Lots and lots of disposable plastic. At the same time there’s been quite a number of changes put in place to “be more green” and help the environment.
I asked my coworkers one day why we use Keurig machines instead of making a pot of coffee and everyone just shrugged. I asked the administrative staff if there was any plans to switch to grounds to reduce the number of Keurig cups and they basically said “No, that would be too much effort.”
In that moment, it really did just feel like everyone around me did not care, so I dropped the subject.
Does anyone have the time to care anymore? I searched for "time" in the comments and found a few unrelated hits.
Good enough is going to be the output when nobody has the time or people's time isn't valued.
Hacker: Last night a confidential source disclosed to me that British arms are being sold to Italian red terrorist groups.
[…]
Hacker: You don't see to be very worried by this information.
Sir Humphrey: Well, these things happen all the time. It’s not our problem.
Hacker: As does robbery with violence, doesn't that worry you?
Sir Humphrey: No, Minister. Home Office problem.
Hacker: Humphrey, we are letting terrorists get hold of murderous weapons.
Sir Humphrey: We are not.
Hacker: Who is?
Sir Humphrey: Who knows? Department of Trade, Minister of Defense, Foreign Office,...
Hacker: We, Humphrey, the British Government. Innocent lives are being set at risk by British arms in the hands of terrorists.
Sir Humphrey: Only Italian lives, not British lives.
Hacker: British tourists abroad.
Sir Humphrey: Tourists? Foreign Office problem!
[......]
Hacker: I don't believe this! We're talking about good and evil.
Sir Humphrey: Ah, Church of England problem.
[....]
Sir Humphrey: Government isn't about morality.
Hacker: Really? What is it about then?
Sir Humphrey: Stability. Keeping thing going. Preventing anarchy. Stopping society falling to bits. Still being here tomorrow.
Hacker: What for?
Sir Humphrey: I beg your pardon?
Hacker: What is the ultimate purpose of government if it isn't for doing good?
Sir Humphrey: Government isn't about good and evil. It's about order or chaos.
I think the undue romanticism for East Asian societies is an instance of not caring. I think it’s racist too.
East Asians are regular people, with regular problems, and regular levels of care or indifference.
I think the same of anyone who believes in the magic of ancient Chinese medicine. It’s not endearing to believe that the Chinese have some mystical otherworldly powers. It’s just racist.