"I don't care; Should it bother me that I don't care?"

Sound familiar? 

You might hear that familiar refrain all too often. On the bus, from friends and family, as pithy social media statuses. People are quick to whine and cry, to point out that the world is going to hell in a hand basket, so to speak.  Everyone is upset about something, and every now and then a particular outrage will bubble to social surface. 

The internet ignites like a veritable tinder box: Kony 2012, the yulin dog meat festival of 2016,  the flint water crisis (that is still ongoing),  and even earlier this year, the kidnapping of 110 chibok school girls in Nigeria.  We are collectively angry, disgusted and rallying. We make hashtags, internet posts, we talk about it a whole lot. Maybe a donation link is set up somewhere, a celebrity picks up the cause and it goes a little farther, but in a few months it all just burns out. The wheel of the news cycle keeps on spinning.  We see this happening not just with large scale events like this- this happens on a micro-scale far more frequently. People become victims of their circumstances, for the lack of a better term for it.  

We live in the age of "moving on", of short term memory, of passively accepting things that happen to us or that we are told. Passive acceptance is essentially people failing to take responsibility for their lives. It feels like we currently are living in a time of a lack of personal responsibility, and people fail to acknowledge that they have the power to make changes. This can be seen on a wide scope- people feel they can not make social or political changes, so they do not vote or participate in the processes that will change things. They feel that one person cannot stall climate change/ environmental destruction, so they take no measures to reduce waste creation or any other measures that would be beneficial. Even in their own lives, people feel more content to let things happen to them instead of making things happen. There's a word for that- apathy: noun, meaning lack of interest, enthusiasm or concern, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. 

If we do not make changes, things will never change. People can’t be bothered to care, and if they are, people certainly aren’t bothered enough to do anything about it. People believe that they cannot change things, or cannot do something, and it is by that paradox that they cannot. It is almost as if we have been collectively conditioned to accept things that are happening with no action. People think they do not singularly have power, influence or authority in their lives. If we continue to float along, thing will not change. Future generations will fall further into inactivity. They will not question things, they will not actively drive their lives.  Instead, I am proposing empowering people to be active participants in their own lives. To be loud, ask questions, and demand answers (and teach future generations to be awake and even louder than we are).  Do not sit around believing that everything will work out; take action and steps to make sure that it does. We are conditioned to accept, not question: Social and political changes, environmental concerns, even changes in our own personal lives. And with that, we accept things happening to us instead of making things happen.

 Why do our brains work like this? 

Dr Winch's ted talk may offer some helpful insight as to why exactly our brains work like this. He classifies much of this avoidance behavior as result of "Psychological injuries". These are our reactions to events that we find to be hurtful in someway or negative to us. Our brain learns that dwelling on prior injuries like these cause us distress, so people will instinctively "reroute" their thoughts around them. As a result of this, people will naturally ignore and suppress thoughts concerning these events or the negative emotions that accompany them.  These are not actions of laziness, but instead those of self protection. We must retrain our brains in this aspect. 

What are the dangers of this at large?

So why does it matter? Why can’t we all just wander around with blinders on, maybe complaining a bit, tweeting a certain hashtag in outrage but realistically taking no actions towards resolution? Because emotion / events like those simply cannot be suppressed forever. Eventually there will come a point where they manifest back to the surface. Tsirigotis and  Uczak both explore this at length in their paper “Manifestations of indirect self-destructiveness and dimensions of emotional intelligence”.They posit that the consequences of suppressed emotional acknowledgement can be quite severe. Self-destructive acts may bubble up,  leading to physical self-harm, social isolation and self-sabotage in many areas of life. Along with the possibility of the increased likely hood of physical and mental personal neglect, it’s easy to see how this could worsen or even create more of the earlier mentioned psychological injuries. We are making ourselves quite literally physically and mentally sick with our failure to act. You may not feel the effects today or tomorrow, but eventually they will come. 

So what are our viable solutions?

There are two schools of thought here; Directness of action or indirectness of action. Take note, however, that both routes require one thing in common- action. You must step forward and create a force of action in either regard. 

Chia’s  “In praise of strategic indirection: An essay on the efficacy of oblique ways of responding”  helps to make options for either of these approaches easy to understand and actual viable courses of action.

 Direct engagement is the traditional (and more obvious) approach but can be very daunting and overwhelming at times. You may feel too small to tackle such a feat, or that you do not have the power or even the authority needed to launch a full-frontal move, as it were. That’s understandable, and even more importantly, alright. 

There is a second option for us, and that would be door number two- indirectness of action. Remember, you still must create action but it will work in smaller or subtler ways. A single person can easily begin to make small, cumulative changes in their real life. Let’s think again to Dr. Winch’s ted talk, and the steps that he broke down for dealing with negative emotions or events. The first step towards any change is acknowledging the problem. Only once you’ve named it and put a face to it, so to speak, can you begin to chart a course and map out steps towards a potential solution.

I hope some of these sentiments that I have shared here strike a chord within you, offering some explanation for why we react the way that we do and the ways in which we can move to action. I would ask you to reconsider the question I first asked once more; the answer I am hoping that you are leaving with should be a resounding "yes".