Keen to hear your thoughts on this! I want to write something that captures the need for participation…giving a damn.
I sometimes look around and wonder when apathy became the global pastime. Everyone talks about politics as if it’s a Netflix show with bad writing: predictable, disposable, watched with half an eye while scrolling Twitter. We consume outrage as entertainment, but when it comes to doing anything with that outrage, we shrink. It’s safer to post a meme, safer to mutter that the system is broken, safer to shrug and move on. But that shrug has become a moral catastrophe. We are shrugging ourselves into collapse.
I grew up in a world where adults would actually fight over zoning and school budgets. It was petty, it was messy, but it was real engagement. Today, the same people who obsess over optimizing their sleep score or getting their macros exactly right will not spend one ounce of attention on what their city council is votIng on. We treat civic life like a relic, as if tending to the common good were a hobby for eccentrics. But it isn’t eccentric. It’s civilization.
I don’t say this from a pedestal. I’ve caught myself falling into the same trap: retreating into career, into personal goals, into the cocoon of curated information feeds. It’s easier to tune it all out. But every time I do, I feel a creeping sense that I’ve handed over the keys of the future to whoever happens to care more, which usually means the loudest cranks and the most resentful minds. And then I ask myself: do I really want them setting the terms of the world my kid will inherit?
The great heresy in our time isn’t claiming that institutions are corrupt - that’s the cliché. The heresy is saying we should still show up for them, fight for them, invest in them, even remake them. That asks us to give a damn, to care about something - anything - that doesn’t directly pad your bank account or elevate your brand. And in a society that worships personal optimization, this almost sounds obscene. Why worry about potholes when you could worry about your dopamine levels? Why sit through a tedious committee meeting when you could hack your way to another productivity gain?
Because those potholes matter. Because those meetings matter. Because the unsexy work of collective life is the only thing that makes private life sustainable. The atomized obsession with self is the great narcotic of our age. We live like monks of personal efficiency, but monks without monasteries, monks without service. A monkhood of selfishness.
Look at how we talk about everything. Climate change? Hopeless. Politics? Rigged. Education? Broken. And yet the good folks throwing up their hands are perfectly capable of spending six hours tweaking their fantasy football draft. The mismatch between what we claim to care about and what we actually invest energy in is grotesque. It’s the biggest character-based scam of our time: pretending to powerlessness while exercising enormous agency in entirely trivial realms.
When did cynicism become wisdom? When did detachment become the respectable posture of educated people? I have friends who say, well, nothing can really be done, the system is too far gone. It’s a coward’s posture. And it’s killing us.
I want to live in a culture where people still take pride in caring. Pride in showing up. Pride in voting in an off-year election, in organizing a neighborhood cleanup, in serving on some dull advisory board. The work is dull because life is dull. Life is dishes and bills and obligations. That’s not a glitch in the human experience; it’s the core, the heart of it. To give a damn, to give even a fraction of a damn is to embrace the dullness as the price of meaning.
Caring won’t fix everything, and sometimes it fixes nothing. Fair enough. But our refusal to care only guarantees our decay. Institutions rot when neglected. Communities dissolve when unattended. Families collapse when everyone chooses self over obligation.
Nihilism is soul-rot. It eats you alive from the inside. I’ve watched friends who thought detachment was liberation slowly lose any sense of purpose. They treat the world like a joke, then wonder why life feels so empty. Caring is exhausting, but it’s the only exhaustion worth having.
If there’s any radical act remaining, to any of us, it’s this: give a damn. About your block. About your school. About the paper ballot you slide into the box. About your neighbour. About the local paper that’s dying because you couldn’t be bothered to subscribe. These are tiny, uncool, unspectacular, unperceived, unadvertised investments of attention. But stack ‘em up, and you get a society that works.
I’ve heard the tech optimist’s side. We’ll innovate our way out of this, some app or platform will replace the boring work of duty. But no app can replace care. No platform can automate responsibility. At some point, someone has to be the person who says: yes, I’ll chair the meeting. Yes, I’ll call my representative. Yes, I’ll go door to door. The future is written by whoever raises their hand.
And the darkest truth is this: the people who do give a damn, even in their toxic, warped ways, are the ones shaping everything left worth giving a damn about. The conspiracy theorists, the bigots, the nihilist populists - they give a damn. They show up. They flood the meetings. They vote. They drown out the rest of us who were too busy scrolling or hustling or meditating. Their world is winning because they bothered.
It’s time to care again. Time to push back against the cultural tide of apathy, irony, and smug detachment. Time to rediscover the basic civic virtue of giving a damn.
Do it now, do it small, do it without the spotlight, do it without a camera pointed anywhere near you, do it even when it feels like you’re doing it on your own. The point is not to be certain of success. The point is to be worthy of the world we say we want.
