The Year of Not Caring
It is time to let go of the things we can't control.
Recently, actor Adam Driver shot back at journalists who asked why he had played two famous Italians (Enzo Ferrari and Maurizio Gucci) in his last two movies.
“Who gives a shit?” he asked.
Indeed, Adam. Who does give a shit? (Although this particular phrase has always puzzled me, as it seems there is a great deal more taking than giving in this scenario. But whatever.)
Driver, it seems, is unwilling to play the game that keeps the world moving these days: the insistence one must care about fake controversies, out-of-context utterances, and self-serving attention-seeking.
If you spend a good deal of time online, you know what I mean. Even if you really don’t accomplish anything during the day, if you’ve spent hours online, you feel exhausted by nightfall, as you have been pulled into dozens of meaningless dramas, each competing for your eyeballs. Just when realize that you shouldn’t care about something you have read, along comes something else to waste your time, until something else comes along. Then you need a nap.
This past weekend, I saw a clip of Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello’s acceptance speech for the band’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. For those who weren’t sentient in the early 1990s, RATM was famous for about three years, had three good songs, and haven’t been relevant since.
So the fact that the RnRHOF deemed them worthy of praise irritated me for a good 20 minutes, causing me to pace around my office and robbing me of valuable time I could be thinking of something more constructive. Why was I allowing something beyond my control to distract me? In the grand scheme of things, who cares whether a bad band is inducted to a ridiculous hall of fame?
But this is the cycle social media draws us all into. People who post incessantly are competing for your attention, and nothing grabs it like outrage. And it keeps us from having quiet, reflective minds.
So this is the year I will be a better person by not caring. I don’t care about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, I don’t care that men are seeking attention by blaming Swift of the Kansas City Chiefs’ recent losing streak, and I don’t care about the women who angrily respond to those idiot men. I don’t care what gif comes up when you type your birth year into the search. I don’t care who is on the list of Jeffrey Epstein’s friends. I don’t care whether Vivek Ramaswamy went SCORCHED EARTH on the media. I don’t care whether a congresswoman enjoys musical theater so much that it forces her to start jerking off her date.
I do. Not. Care. And you can’t make me.
It just so happens that as this realization came to me, I had been reading a lot about the Ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism, which is making quite a bit of a comeback. (And if the next few paragraphs sound like someone who might be joining a cult, I totally get it. I will be willing to star in the eventual Netflix documentary about it.)
The Stoics effectively thought that you should ignore everything that’s not in your control. If you base your personal happiness on all the external things happening in the world, you will always be disappointed. Basically, all you can do is control your own virtue and let the chips fall where they may. Events going on in the world are neither good nor bad, they are just neutral events - but how we react to them and whether we give them our attention is actually in our control.
And despite being hatched thousands of years ago, this is applicable to how the world is now - external events trying to take over your life. Half-baked causes try to play on your sympathies and ask you to give money. Loud-mouthed politicians say unforgivable things to troll us into a visceral reaction. Modern social media has thrown jet fuel on the attention economy, but the Greeks like Epictetus and Romans like Marcus Aurelius had the cure for it all along. (During my reading, I also stumbled upon the philosophy of Cleanthes of Assos, born 330 B.C., who was undoubtedly history’s first child to be bullied.)
Of course, that doesn’t mean I can’t care about some things. I am a writer, after all, and if I cared about nothing, it would make for some pretty boring columns. And in a way, I suppose, through my column, I can affect things I normally couldn’t.
But I care about my family, my friends, and my coworkers. I care about people dying in the Middle East. I care about democracy and free speech and individual liberty. I care about the Green Bay Packers. (Although this breaks my rule - I cannot control how the Packers play, and yet I spend a great deal of time worrying about them. One suspects Socrates would also be a Wisconsin sports fan if given the chance - the Milwaukee Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo is Greek, after all.)
Basically, Stoicism comes down to the old Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” No longer should we all be wasting our time on petty Twitter (X) fights or chasing down meaningless rabbit holes. Just do the best you can and let go of the rest.
(Unless I am part of “the rest” - do not let go of me!)
ALSO
It has been a while since I checked in, but I am still co-hosting Wasn’t That Special: 50 Years of SNL, a podcast in which my partner and I review each and every season of Saturday Night Live. We are up to Season 13 now, and I guarantee you that when we are done, it will be the most comprehensive summary of SNL that has ever existed in the world.
Every now and then, we offer a full episode as a free sample - for instance, you can go here and listen to our summary of the famous Season 10 (the Billy Crystal/Martin Short year that ran from 1984 to 1985). If you like it, please subscribe and join us for the whole journey!
ALSO
I’ve also been keeping up on my weekly National Review columns, including this one from earlier this week. (It’s a gift link, so it’s free.) After a full week of news about the Harvard president being forced to step down following plagiarism accusations, it seemed like there wasn’t much more to say. But one aspect of the whole Claudine Gay affair troubled me: Even though she deserved to be fired, it’s a bit creepy that technology now allows everyone to research your entire past with the click of a few buttons. We all used to be able to make mistakes as a young person, grow from them, and leave them in the past. But the internet makes sure we carry the weight of all our bad decisions in perpetuity.
I wrote:
So while the revelations that led to Gay’s loss of her high perch (she will still be a professor) may confirm everything you thought about the ivory tower, be warned: We are entering an era in which your personal history will follow you forever, even if what you did happened before you could even imagine any technology capturing it.
One of the most common plot devices used in 19th-century literature was that of the “fetch,” or doppelgänger — a character who is two people at once. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Double makes use of this device, as does Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Often, when a literary character meets his double, it is a sure sign that death is upon him. This turned out to be the case for Gay’s career as the president of Harvard once Gay’s past as a scholar walked into the room. In her case, what happened next was justified. When it’s you, you may think otherwise.
With the rise of technology, it now appears we are all two people, often fighting with each other: The person you used to be, and the person you are now. As Gay found out, these days, there is no escaping you.
Don’t worry, I ran the column through the plagiarism-checker and it came out clean. So I still remain eligible to run Harvard.
Read the full thing here.
And if you want to find all my columns, they are here.
FINALLY
On the entertainment front, I returned to our music podcast to rattle off my favorite albums of 2023. They are:
Hello Mary - Hello Mary
La Sécurité - Stay Safe!
The Bug Club - Rare Birds: Hour of Song
Sweeping Promises - Good Living is Coming for You
Palehound - Eye on the Bat
Lana Del Rey - Did you know that there's a tunnel under Ocean Blvd
Jeff Rosenstock - HELLMODE
Snõõper - Super Snõõper
Melenas - Ahora
Alex Lahey - The Answer is Always Yes
If you’re dying to hear me talk about these albums and listen to a little bit of what they sound like, check this out.
And here’s “Marriage,” from The Bug Club, which rips:
Yep, fixed.
I enjoyed this column. But perhaps in violation of the gist of the column, wasn't Marcus Aurelius a Roman emperor? (And didn't his son star in Gladiator?)