Please, be Chalant
It ain't easy
Words by
John Maitland
Published on
Sep 18, 2025
From the time we’re kids, there’s a schoolyard lesson that seeps in quietly: it’s cool not to care. We’re taught early that detachment protects us— from scraped knees, rejection, embarrassment. The world applauds a good shrug. What begins as self-defense becomes habit. The “too-cool-for-school” act starts as a costume and ends as a way of being.
Then came social media, which put a ring light on the performance. Whole aesthetics formed around being unbothered. Caring became cringe. Earnestness turned into something you apologized for. Detachment started to feel like currency.
For a long time I thought that was my superpower. Keeping distance helped me observe, until those observations hardened into judgment, and judgment into a wall. What I called perspective was really insulation. Somewhere along the line, aloofness stopped feeling cool and started feeling cold.
The reality is simple, though it took me years to learn it: caring is the most important thing we can do. Distance doesn’t protect you; it only blurs everything you love. Caring brings the world back into focus. It connects you to the grain of life—the real texture of being alive.
When you care, you notice. How food tastes when you cook it for someone else. How a stranger’s story rearranges your sense of scale. How a small act of kindness can break the static of a day. That kind of attention isn’t sentimental; it’s just accurate. Caring is the only way to see the world clearly. Everything else is noise.
Caring doesn’t make life softer. It makes it sturdier. Every structure we build: a home, a friendship, a workplace, a country, relies on people who still give a damn. When care leaves the room, corners get cut and motives twist. What was once collaboration becomes competition; what was once trust becomes a checklist.
Apathy isn’t neutral. It’s decay. It lets rot set in quietly until the foundation gives. Care is the maintenance we forget to schedule, the oil change light that keeps nagging us on our dashboard.
No one can care all the time. Apathy seeps in for a reason; it lets us rest. The trick is noticing when rest turns to retreat. Too much apathy drains the color out of living; too much empathy burns you down to ash. Caring isn’t endurance—it’s balance. The rhythm of feeling, pausing, then feeling again.
There’s a reason people stop caring. Attention is a hungry thing. Capitalism turns it into currency and exhaustion into a badge of honor. Under that kind of pressure, detachment starts to look like survival.
Pulling back can be healthy. Sometimes it’s the only way to stay afloat. But caring was never the enemy of rest; it’s the reason to rest. It reminds us why recovery matters.
Caring isn’t about shareholder value. It’s about self-worth—the belief that our attention matters and that empathy is power, not weakness. Healthy detachment lets us breathe; chronic detachment makes us ghosts. Without care, the system wins. With it, we remember that the point was never efficiency. It was connection.
Caring changes the texture of work and life. It makes the job less job-y. When you care, you bring your whole self—the curious parts, the tired parts, the ones that still believe things can be better. Collaboration becomes mutual care in motion.
Caring for one another is radical in a time that celebrates apathy. It’s not loud; it’s the quiet act of paying attention. We live in a world trying to automate the human out of everything. I can ask ChatGPT to finish my sentence, but it will never be my friend. You might be.
Relationships and care are what make all of this worth doing. They turn effort into meaning and remind us that behind every task and system, there’s still a pulse trying to be felt.
So yes, caring is cool. Not because it looks good. Because it feels like being human.
—
I still struggle with this, if I’m honest. It isn’t something I’ve solved or turned into a strength. I disassociate when I’m overwhelmed, usually when I start worrying what other people might think. I’ve spent most of my life trying to seem normal enough to belong and interesting enough to be liked, and that tension wears thin. When I sense judgment coming, I retreat into the quiet parts of my mind and call it observation. I’ve built a life around noticing things, but noticing is not the same as feeling. Staying connected to work, to people, to myself takes practice. Some days I get it right. Most days I vanish into the noise and call it rest. Caring, for me, is not a natural state but a choice I have to keep making, one that reminds me that presence is a discipline, not a default.