In a world that increasingly demands side-taking, hot takes, and intense passion about absurdly unimportant things, the act that’s most helped me stay stress-free is developing the mental habit of apathy.

Definition

The word “apathy” often has negative connotations, something of which I’m well aware, so I want to make clear what I mean by it. Oxford defines the word as “the feeling of not being interested in or enthusiastic about something”, and Cambridge says it’s “behaviour that shows no interest or energy and shows that someone is unwilling to take action”. Unfortunately, Cambridge adds “especially over something important” — and this is where the negative connotation of apathy comes from.

I want it clear that I’m leaving off that last bit. I do think it’s crucial to be interested in, and be willing to take action over, things that are important — human rights, politics, and so on. The key is the ability to determine which things are important, and thus direct one’s energy toward those things, while training oneself to remain specifically apathetic toward the things that are not important.

The Subjectivity Of Importance

Already, my sharply intelligent readers will be hopping up and down to point out that “what’s important” is highly subjective. Of course it is. Things that are important to one person seem trivial to another; there’s no getting around that. To my neighbor, fantasy football is incredibly important; to a former acquaintance, tractor sales trends are important; and so on.

But I think most of us are capable of setting aside our own likes and hobbies for a moment and realizing that, long term, some things are more important than others. For example, today, it might be more important to me to finish the current book I’m reading than to teach my children all they know to be fully-functioning adults; yet I easily realize that in the long term the latter is objectively more important. And if we can do that, then we can also step outside ourselves and make more objective determinations about the relative importance of various topics. Of course, we still might disagree, and that’s okay — this isn’t about whether we agree; it’s about me teaching myself to care about some things while withholding concern about others.

All Wound Up

Despite my vision of myself as someone who calmly collects information, dissects it, sorts everything out, and dispassionately reflects on it, I’m a human being and sometimes do actually get caught up in the excitement of the moment — both good and bad. Often, doing so makes one appear ridiculous to others. But more to the point, it incrementally adds to the stress, exhaustion, and world-weariness we all eventually come to experience.

The most frustrating thing, for me, is when I discover I’ve gotten all wound up over something that is truly unimportant. I want to save that emotional energy for true tragedies and triumphs. Surely it has something to do with my age, the increasing sense that I only have X amount of life force remaining and that I want to ration that out over time.

Retraining The Brain

I think I first began working on this 10 or 15 years ago when I found myself intensely emotional over a college football game — one to which I had zero ties of any kind. I stepped outside myself (so to speak) and watched in fascination as I became angry over a bad call, excited over a surprisingly effective trick play, and grief-stricken when my favored team couldn’t pull it out in the end. That realization wasn’t a pivotal moment in my life by any means. (I tend not to have “pivotal moments” or epiphanies like one sees in fiction or other people; I am much more likely to have a series of experiences and thought processes that result in incremental change.)

Over time, I began noticing these moments more frequently — as I trained myself to look out for them. Eventually, I wondered if I could do anything about it. I decided I should try.

One of the first things I began to do was ask myself, “Is any of this truly important?” And of course it’s always important to someone, or it wouldn’t have come up, but what I mean is “Is it worth it TO ME to get emotionally worked up about it?”

Most often, I found the answer was a simple “no”.

Depending on the situation, another question I can ask myself is, “Is it really hurting anyone?” This came up several years ago when I read a story about how many adults spent 10* or more hours per week playing video games. (* The “10” might not be the exact number in the story; that’s not relevant here.) My initial reaction was to be stupefied about the ridiculous waste of time; I strongly considered a biting blog entry about the horrid life choices blah blah blah. Until I asked myself if it was really causing any harm. Some people watch TV that much; is it any worse or better to spend the same hours playing video games? Other people use that same time to crochet or knit things that their younger relatives will never wear or use; or carry binoculars through state parks to identify species of birds; or any number of activities at which grown people choose to spend their free time. (For me, it’s most often reading, writing, or making photos of things that other people deem unimportant.)

The point isn’t whether adults playing video games is a good idea or bad idea; the point is that I was about to get worked up over it — emotionally charged. And that was bad for me. And that I did the same thing about all sorts of topics (like adults who dress up as My Little Pony), but eventually trained myself to simply not care.

Controlling It

The reason I said controlled in the headline is because I have to be able to control this. If I simply become apathetic about everything, then the negative connotations come into play. Because there are times when I need to care, need to get worked up, and want to be emotionally involved in something-or-other — those times when something is truly important.

No, I’m not claiming to have precise control over my emotions. Even if I think it might someday be possible via scientific advances, today I don’t think it is possible. Emotions are basically hormones — chemicals — that get inserted into our various physical functions without conscious control. If you didn’t eat right or sleep right, you can get angry or frustrated more quickly and not even realize why it’s happening except in hindsight. What little control we have over our emotions is necessarily reactive rather than proactive.

But preparedness helps. Making a habit helps. When the next thing comes along that I’m about to react to in a hyped-up emotional frenzy sort of way, I’m already ready. I can’t stop the chemicals or the initial instinctive feeling, but I can head it off pretty quickly — with the questions mentioned above.

And, of course, like most other adults, I’ve learned to fake it. The weird thing is, if you get good enough at faking it, it sometimes becomes the real thing. If what I’m actually feeling is disgust, but I fake ambivalence well enough, then pretty soon I realize that what I actually feel is ambivalence. If it’s something that I really do want to feel, but can’t — say the relative cuteness of someone else’s baby — then I fake it until it becomes real. Often what makes it real is the feedback from those in the room — seeing them react to my acting.

Conclusion

Unlike most of my 2019 blog entries, I wrote this in a day. I’m not certain it adequately expresses what I’m trying to say. Maybe I need more concrete examples, or maybe I need to re-read it a few more times.

But the main things to take from this are these: (1) I had noticed myself getting overly emotionally involved about things that I realized in hindsight weren’t worth the effort. (2) I want to reserve that effort for things that are worth it to me. (3) I came up with a few habits of self-questioning and emotion-directing in order to curb the tendency. I think it’s made me happier — or at least less unhappy and more pleasant to be around.

I assume none of this is ground-breaking to anyone; that others do basically the same thing whether they’re doing it consciously or not. It’s just something I was thinking about today and believed I could express it.