Photo by Jess Loiterton.
I’m pretty sure my problem is that I care too much.
We should start by pointing out that this isn’t actually a problem. Not in the true sense of the word. This isn’t describing an issue where resolution would provide considerable relief. The resolution to caring too much would be caring less. And in most situations, that’s not better. That’s worse.
When it came up the first time, it sounded less like a concern and more like a self-serving pageant answer. Like something new grads are coached to say when an interviewer inevitably asks about their biggest weakness.
I care too much.
But this wasn’t coming from new grads. The people worried about caring too much were decades into their careers. Skilled practitioners. Designers. Engineers. Creatives. People who somehow figured out how to take their favourite hobbies and turn them into long-running, fulfilling careers. This is a neat trick.
In fact, it’s such a neat trick that the oft-quoted adage “love what you do and you’ll never work a day in your life,” is simultaneously misattributed to Mark Twain and Confucius. How’s that for range? The quote is not “love what you do and you’ll wish you cared less.” But that’s exactly what we’re finding. That the people who care the most are having the hardest time.
Inflammable means flammable?!
Businesspeople, we’ve entered a weird moment when caring about the organization and your craft is a liability. And when pressed for details on why caring less seems appealing, the answers are dark.
Care less because we’re on our seventh layoff and it’s just a matter of time before your name is on the list.
Care less because we’ve asked you and your colleagues to train AI to do your job and we revamped staffing plans against productivity gains that have yet to materialize. So you can either drive yourself batty trying to carry an impossible workload, or you can cut corners. And we mean, a lot of corners.
Care less because the org is shipping slop at every level and the justification is that every one of our competitors is doing it, too. As an industry, we all need to get used to caring less to stay competitive.
Care less. If the org is going in the wrong direction, let it. If the tech doesn’t work that way, pray you get packaged out before the clean-up begins. Keep your head down. Don’t make waves. Do what you’re told. Even if it doesn’t make any sense. Even if you were hired for your expertise. Don’t bring your expertise to work. Save it for your tinkering and your hobbies.
This logic is dizzying. If you got a headache reading it, please know that we have headaches writing it. It’s hard to imagine that this management nugget even needs to be said out loud but here it is. Telling your employees to care less and do a worse job en masse is not a competitive advantage. And that this passes for visionary leadership and is rewarded by the market is the surest sign we’re into some totally upside-down-face corporate groupthink.
This would be bad enough on its own. But worse, still, is when you try to point out how upside-down it all is, you get told you’re a doomer and you’re trying to slow progress that’s imminent and inevitable. Despite few signs of said imminence or said progress.
Care less is not the answer to a problem. It’s organizational inflammation. It’s sustained moral injury. It’s the absence of psychological safety. The undermining of high-trust, high-performing teams. It’s a gaping hole where judgement and quality and excellence go. And however bad this sounds, it’s about to get worse. Because employee engagement is a lagging business indicator.
This is a bad outcome
Look, even if you believe everything they’re selling. Even if it sounds uncomplicated and obvious to you that AI can unlock major productivity wins. That human-AI centaurs will gallop merrily through the productivity fields — humans thinking big thoughts while their AI legs scurry them hither and yon at super-human speed. Even if that all hangs together for you as a plausible theory of what might happen. At some point you have to grapple with the evidence of your eyes and ears, that it isn’t happening.
Disengaged employees are a bad outcome. They do worse work, collaborate less, and generate fewer innovative ideas. Their customer interactions are worse, their sales numbers are lower, they don’t grow or take on new responsibilities within the organization. The higher the proportion of your employees who are disengaged, the more likely you’ll develop what organizational psychologists call “actively disengaged” employees — the ones who deliberately undermine the organization. The ones who start fires.
A disengaged workforce is generally more compliant but that’s also a problem. Strong leaders at every level work hard to encourage a personal sense of ownership and thoughtful, constructive criticism. As a boss, it’s an amazing feeling to have a team see around corners you haven’t, and spot a big risk early or surprise you with a better approach. Yes, there may come a moment when the org has to make a call and move on, some people really like to talk decisions through a lot. But it is the weakest of weaksauce to actively preempt that dissent.
And like, listen. It’s okay to have been wrong, here. Lots of theories sound good until you test their predictive power. We — not we we, but the collective labour-societal-all-of-us we — have been testing a theory for the last few years. A theory that AI-augmented workplaces will be better. A theory that predicted that a lot of people would lose their jobs (true!) and be unhappy about it (that’s a bingo!) but also that those who remained employed would flourish through a combination of freed up time and mental capacity for elevated work. That last prediction is wrong. Catastrophically deadass backwards wrong. Many of the people it predicted would flourish, many of your most engaged employees, are struggling. Hard. They are losing mental capacity instead of gaining it. And, maybe worse, they’ve concluded that they should stop caring.
Cleaning up after centaurs
Everyone is quick to point out that AI is here to stay. We said it ourselves, a year ago, and followed it up with:
Understand that the people who tell you it will make beautiful art don’t know how art is made, and the people who tell you it will build thriving teams don’t know how thriving teams are built, either.
Plenty of people are still hyping it. CEOs still worry about falling behind if they don’t push AI hard. Ditto their board members. Public markets still reward mass layoffs as long as you say AI five times in the first two paragraphs. You’re still receiving emails that you’re pretty sure the other person didn’t write. Caring stillfeels like a chump move.
So now what?
Well. If you’re a boss, it’s time to look around at the state of your team. Where are things healthy, and where have the centaurs trod everything into the mud? It’s easy to get distracted by raw production output — bots are very good at that. But ask yourself some harder questions. Are you losing the people who care — either quickly in the turnover numbers, or slowly in the engagement stats? What is the quality of the team’s work? What is the quality of their collaboration, and their creative conflict? How does the team feel these days? And if any of those indicators are falling, how are you going to address it?
And as for you as an individual. Thinking that maybe you’re just gonna start to care less. Like, hey, we get it. You have to take care of yourself and if that means building some space, caring less about work for a while, then maybe that’s what you have to do. Maybe for a little while that will feel like relief.
But, with love in our hearts, we don’t believe you. We don’t believe that you can stop caring over the long run. No one who knows what it’s like to genuinely love their work, and the people they work with and for, and the people their work impacts — no one who feels that way finds it easy to shut it off long-term. And it is a shouty belief of ours, by the way, that you shouldn’t have to.
There are lots of us out there who care. Even more if you count the ones currently pretending they don’t, just to get through the day. We don’t know how to tell you where to find the ones close to you, but if you already know a few, you’ve gotta spend more time with them. The weirdest thing about work right now is the way it seems like everyone sees this enshittification as inevitable. It isn’t, and they don’t. And part of how you find the energy — to care about your work, or find new work you can care about, or start a new org full of people who care — part of where that energy will come from is by fixing your inputs. The people who care are sometimes quieter than the hypebeasts, but there are lots of us and we should all hang out more.
— Melissa & Johnathan
