It’s no secret that today, we are constantly confronting people with a mentality similar to this headline. Whether it is because of romance, our family, friends or other life circumstances, it has become increasingly common to not care, but why is that? Why have we chosen not to show such human emotion? 

I wish I had a clear answer, but maybe painting a quick picture of how my life has been affected by this will help us come to one: 

The year is 2014, and at the time, I was in my first year of middle school. Compared to elementary school, I was entering a new environment where I had no friends and quickly had to adapt to this unfamiliarity to be successful. At the time, one of my biggest passions was my love of Minecraft, which led to me meeting and bonding with my first friend during such an intimidating time. 

Simply from having that shared passion, we would become best friends as we would be together throughout the school day and go to each other’s houses to play. 

This was extremely important to me as most people in our grade had already known each other for a year. However, newer students like my best friend and I joined the fold, and we could either sink or swim. 

While I was learning to swim in the face of this adversity, my best friend started to sink. He began fighting classmates, participating in arguments that would get him kicked out of class, and more importantly, making it hard to be his friend. In his mind, he thought that those who triggered these responses out of him, which weren’t well thought out in the slightest, deserved it. He quickly made more enemies than friends with this rationale and was gone the next school year. 

Just like that, any semblance of familiarity I had known was gone instantly because of someone else’s inability to stop and think. To this day, because of this, and the many experiences that have followed, being close to people has become problematic as I assumed they’d leave me in one way or another. 

When it comes down to answering this question, it’s apparent that people who claim they “don’t care” never sit with their actions and think about the people they’re hurting with their actions. We are all human and ideally, we should care. However, we live in a generation that makes it seem like a cardinal sin to do so. We all, including myself, are perpetrators of this because when things go wrong, we quickly say we don’t care to cope. 

When we get cheated on, hurt someone else’s feelings or betray our friends, we pretend not to care and that’s a huge societal issue. Truthfully, not caring is a coping mechanism to protect ourselves from letting people get to our emotions and making us feel anything. However, by doing so, we kiss goodbye caring about how our decisions impact others. 

If any reader takes anything from this piece, let it be this: Think of someone you love and ask yourself if you’d ever want them to experience the pain, we subject each other to. From there, we can do better than creating more enormous monsters who say, “I don’t care.”