"just chill!" wow thanks, eat glass!

postcard 51: on the act of caring as the backbone of society, nonchalance as an illusion of power, and my hatred of being told "to chill"

The Notebook (2003)

A few months ago, I was texting this guy I liked. I already hate texting because I feel like I can never quite get across words exactly the way I mean it, but trying to talk to someone you are romantically interested in? A whole otherworldly migraine-nightmare.

There is so much that goes into the science of texting a crush, like a potion concocted in a lab—you need just the right amount of interest, flirting, self-consciousness (but not too much), and the magic word: nonchalance. There is nothing worse than being too interested, too eager to talk to someone you’re into. I found myself pre-sending drafts of texts to my friends like I was in middle school, asking, is this okay to send? I don’t want it to seem like, too much, you know? At one point, I gave myself a horrified look in the mirror, almost dropping my phone like I was holding a hot iron skillet with bare hands, wondering to myself what on earth I was doing as an adult.

The feeling of hesitation and second guessing my replies really sucked, because I really liked this guy. We had a ridiculous amount of shared interests and experiences, and the conversation never cut off. Minutes would bleed into hours. I’d text him until three in the morning but then finding myself sending walls of texts, I’d stop myself short, wondering if I sent one text too many, thinking about all the Reels and Tiktoks of ‘guy advice’ that popped up unannounced on my feed like some new incredibly contagious COVID strain. I called my friend and asked, “why should it be embarrassing that I care about something, or someone?” Asking my friends if something I wanted to say to someone was okay to say felt odd, embarrassing even—I had never done this before because I hadn’t ever given texting a second thought. My friends replied with copious amounts of “this is very out of character for you, are you..ill?”

In college, after I went on a date, I was writing out a text to send to the guy (a generic “hey, had a great time!” although I hadn’t really, but it’s just pleasantries) when one of my friends plucked my phone out of my hand and held it above his head. “You can’t send that before him,” he told me, panicked shock ringing in his voice. “You need to wait for him to send it to you first. You’re going to seem like you like him too much, and it’s going to look desperate. Do you want to look desperate, Elle?” I shook my head, of course not. I know that there are all these measures and scaffoldings that construct the modern dating world—don’t text for a second date until a week later, don’t have sex on the first date, don’t text about the date first—but why had simple communication morphed into a disfigured, and disfiguring, sort of bureaucratic process? Why was letting someone know I enjoyed spending time with them, while a white lie in that specific case, a cause for concern which I would have to delicately time and snip like the red wires on a ticking bomb?

Growing up I was never nonchalant or indifferent about things. Sure, I tried because I thought that was the cool way to be, but I was never wired that way. I wrote in one of my postcards about this last year:

I don’t know how to do things halfway. Twenty four years in, I’ve realized that maybe that’s my greatest strength and maybe it’s what makes me think that I am a difficult person to love. It’s a perfectionist thing, maybe, like I have to do everything the exact way it goes in my head. I’m selective—maybe way too picky—with the people I choose to trust and love. It takes me a long time to do so, but once it happens, I do it wholeheartedly. I’m all in or all out. I keep a small crowd of best friends around me. I trust them wholly, I love them wholly.

I think I’ve spent my entire life trying to make myself less for people, a watered down version of me, trying to extinguish how intensely I feel everything. I’ve tried being the cool girl and the chill girl and the girl who lets everything slide because I do genuinely admire when people have that ability. I wish I could be relaxed about anything. I stretch myself as thin as I can across jobs. I write pages and pages of thoughts about a book. I pulled countless all nighters for good grades. I love people fiercely or I don’t at all.

There was, and still is, no remark that makes me break out into angry hives more than “just chill out, Elle” and its exciting variants, encores of, “it’s not that deep”, “god, just relax”. I once got sent home with a note from my teacher in the third grade because the boy sitting next to me told me this, and I scribbled ASSHOLE!! in his spelling journal. My parents sat me down and talked to me that night, not with the intention of scolding me, but to ask why that specific line made me so angry. I was not an angry kid growing up, so this must have felt very uncharacteristic of me to my parents. Even over a decade later, the conclusion I reached that day still stands: there is nothing more patronizing and infuriating than someone telling you to chill, to care less, to water yourself down, and to make yourself exist in a smaller way in a room.

There is this word in Korean that cannot be directly translated into English: 무안 (pronounced: mu-ahn). While the closest way I can describe it is embarrassment or shame seeped in deep discomfort, English words fail to capture its nuance. It’s the feeling you get when you excitedly talk about something and then someone replies, nobody asked you. Or you tell a joke and the room falls silent with nobody laughing. Or someone publicly recalls something embarrassing that you did in the past. It’s a sort of embarrassment that exclusively exists in a social setting when your heart sinks and you feel the back of your neck start to sweat. That is the untranslatable feeling I get whenever someone tells me to “just chill”, like I did something wrong for some reason because that specific feeling mostly surfaces whenever enthusiasm is met with indifference.

This comes in tandem with the fact that there seems to be a nonchalance epidemic in today’s society. The person who holds all the cards in their hands is the one who cares less because this somehow means that they have the emotional upper hand. Sincerity and earnestness seem dead, gone, and buried, a final eulogy for enthusiasm; when the dust has settled, we are left with a distressing trade off—a collective sacrifice of genuine human connection and care for the illusory security of forever avoiding rejection.

By engaging in this phenomenon, we’re not just slowly eroding away the tethers of human connection, but also dismantling the very essence and reason for our existence. The fundamental basis of our beings lies in our pursuit of doing something that we think will make us happy, and we imbue these actions with care and heartfelt efforts. When you force yourself to stop caring, heeding the fallacy of a victory through nonchalance, you’ll feel the life bleed out of something unintentional as well.

There is no such thing as well intentioned apathy.

One of my favorite books. Beautiful World, Where Are You, has this quote that I come back to time and again:

Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn't it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganizing the distribution of the world's resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it's the very reason I root for us to survive - because we are so stupid about each other.

There is something so extraordinary about this paragraph, which encapsulates the very reason this book changed my life three years ago. Like the quote, much of the reason why life is beautiful and why it is okay to perceive life as such is because of the people we love and the connections we make throughout our time in this world. A rare boundless optimism exists within those lines and it’s this specific joy that is found within melancholy that I deeply appreciate. This sort of love and optimism, by extension, cannot be established within the gray frames of indifference. In this vein, caring is, quite literally, the backbone of society. I fear for what will happen if we begin ignoring its significance. As indifference, in all its grayscale, chronically infects the technicolor of life, the world will become unrecognizable.

Every aspect of human civilization is rooted in our capacity for care. Literature exists because we cared so much about a story or subject that we had to sit down and pen our thoughts. Philosophy exists because we cared so much about our existences that it led to ruminations and theories about our places in the universe. Art exists because we cared so much about the landscapes of our surroundings and imaginations that they manifested as brushstrokes on canvas. Even STEM subjects and groundbreaking innovations exist because we cared enough about the world around us to inquisitively attempt to make sense of it through quantitative and empirical data. All of history, all of these subjects, are scrawls and evidence that there are no shortcuts or exceptions to caring. The fact is simple: it is because we give a shit, that the society that we live in is possible.

A week or so ago, I came across a viral tweet (that I unfortunately cannot find despite scrolling) of a Tiktok screenshot in which a girl is advising people to use ChatGPT to send messages to crushes. You can adjust the tone too, she captions, and I immediately cringed upon seeing it. Even in my “is this okay to send?” phase, the thought of doing this quite literally never crossed my mind, because wasn’t this actually putting in more effort than just thinking for yourself? The fact that we have begun depending on nonhuman avenues for deeply and exclusively human activities such as conversation, sets a deeply dangerous precedent for our future. Are we witnessing a seismic societal shift in which people are so lazy and apathetic that they cannot put in the effort to formulate a single response? In this vein and in my opinion, generative AI has been the biggest cause of the nonchalance epidemic, causing what was before a generalized ailment of the heart to metastasize in ways it otherwise would have not.

The thought of sending an AI generated text makes me recoil in disgust because I would rather not send anything than rely on a machine to figure out my thoughts. Perhaps the reason for this societal malaise, the reason people have become so indifferent is because the absence of thought in our daily activities has become disconcertingly normalized, even encouraged. The overwhelming accessibility and cornucopia of information has pulverized our capacity for critical thinking, instant gratification wearing away a previous patience to attempt to seek out answers for ourselves. If we truly believe that the internet can provide us with a streamlined instruction manual for life’s answers, if we blindly trust a machine to form basic thoughts and feelings on our behalf, then of course caring about something is going to seem like a useless and superfluous endeavor.

How do you read a book that changes your life?; see a piece of art that viscerally moves you?; watch a movie that becomes so ingrained in your mind you can replay it scene by scene when you close your eyes?; love someone so fiercely that you don’t think there is anything you wouldn’t do for them?—and then decide that caring is too much of an emotional investment? Where else would you find the beauty and meaning in life? By typing something in the question box of an AI website? By seeing this enthusiasm and passion light up someone’s eyes and telling them to “just chill”? Really, what are the implications of a society that prioritizes ephemeral convenience over something that underpins the tapestry of a world in which we believe the antidote to the inconvenience of caring is wielding nonchalance like a weapon? If, when given the chance, we opt for a mirage of comfort instead of genuine connection, will we, in Sally Rooney’s words, stop “being stupid about each other”? This cannot be true. It is too cynical to believe, even for me.