Transcript

What is Apathy? The Answer Might Surprise You

Well, hey there. Welcome back. What’s this episode about? Who cares?

So, many years ago, I was with a few of my friends and one of my friends said, “What’s apathy?” And my other friend said, “Who cares?” And it took a little while to realize that he was actually answering the question.

Visualizing Motivation: The Psychology of “BeCAUSE!“

As you may or may not know, I’ve written patent-pending software now that actually can help me to do behavioral mapping. It’s an offshoot of my latest book called Because. And I’m finding there are many, many offshoots of the whole concept of Because, which is based on Freud’s pleasure principle: seek pleasure, avoid pain. The software has allowed me to visualize all of these interesting concepts that might be kind of hard to visualize. And in doing so, it’s allowed me to see things that even I didn’t see while writing the book.

Why You Never Finish Your To-Do List

Let’s talk about your to-do list to make this a little clearer. You can create a to-do list and then you can assign priorities. You can create a to-do list and then you can convince yourself that the one you really want to do is the one you should do. I talk about this in one of the chapters. You’ve probably made many to-do lists. Some of them grand, some of them small.

But like most people, you don’t have a sort of a grand overarching to-do list. Like your life list, if you will. You can get complicated. And on that life list, you can have, “I’m going to climb a mountain.” “Here’s my bucket list.” “Here’s me finding love.” Here is, “Oh, that’s right. I have to get groceries. I have to cut the grass.” Like, all these things are to-dos, and some of them are of a grander scale or not.

If you think about your own list, there might be something that you keep putting on there, but you never do it. And so if we apply monsters and unicorns and we mapped it out, we could probably see that maybe there’s something painful about it, that there’s just too much pain that this thing generates and you feel like there’s no return on investment. Or there’s just not enough pleasure generated, or there’s not enough pain being generated if you don’t do it.

The Unfinished Novel: A Case Study in Laziness vs. Apathy

Let’s take an example. Let’s say you have an awesome life doing what you do. You have your full-time job. You’re invested. You have a career and all that stuff. And one day you’re thinking, “You know what, I wouldn’t mind writing a novel, a fiction.”

So, you put that on your little to-do list and you think about it sometimes. And once in a great while, you write a few words here and there. And finally, after seeing it on your list and looking back on the fact that you’ve been writing this novel for almost a year now and have almost nothing to show for it—you know, you never really made an outline, you don’t really have much in the way of the characters or any research or anything like that.

You look at it and you might realize, if you had access to the kinds of things we talk about here on the podcast all the time, “Oh, I’m afraid of failure. That’s so strong I’m never going to finish this novel.” Or, “I’m afraid I can’t write realistic dialogue.” Or, “I’m afraid it’s going to take too much time away from me,” and so forth. And we’re defining monsters and monsters and monsters.

But let’s say instead of that, when you do your self-examination, you’re like, “Well, I guess I could work on it. I don’t know. I just don’t care.”

Now, that’s apathy.

If you just don’t care, it means there aren’t any monsters and unicorns at all. There’s nothing that says, “Ooh, this will be pleasurable.” “Ooh, my friends will think better of me when I do this.” Or, “Ooh, this I’ll feel good because I’ll have accomplished something.” Or, “Oh, I’m afraid of embarrassment if I don’t finish it,” and blah, blah, blah. You won’t have any of that because you just simply don’t care.

Introducing Selective Indifference: The Apathy You Should Have

You can be a fairly dynamic individual interested in a multitude of things, whether it’s improving skills or hobbies or creativity or what have you. And you can have things that you simply don’t care about. You can’t like everything. You can’t care about everything.

I don’t want to jump out of a plane. It’s not because I don’t care. It’s because I have a monster that says, “That’s going to hurt when you hit the ground.” And any unicorn that might be there that says how cool it would be to do that is really tiny compared to the giant monster that says, “The sudden stop is really bad. Don’t do that.” So, I’m not doing that.

I’m also not, for the most part, going to go to an opera. And there’s really no monster-unicorn waiting for me there that says, you know, “Don’t go, it’s going to sound terrible,” or, “You should go because it’ll improve your culture.” I just… I don’t care. And I know this is going to shock you, but I kind of feel that way about sports. I don’t keep up on sports and things. So, I don’t care how certain teams do or anything like that. And I know that’s shocking and I’m sorry and I apologize, but I’m kind of the same way with that, too. It frees up a lot of time, I’ll tell you that.

So, I’m apathetic towards going to the opera. I’m apathetic towards sports for the most part. But if I place something on my list and I look back and I eventually realize I’m apathetic towards that, I have to think about that. And you should too. You should also be thinking about the things in your life that you have apathy towards.

Are You Lazy or Just Selectively Indifferent?

And by defining these things and defining what apathy is, as opposed to what it could be—which is laziness, or at least something you could define as laziness and say, “You know what, I don’t want to do that right now. I’d rather eat some chips. I’d rather go do that fun thing. I’d rather do that thing that makes me feel more productive.” Maybe it’s not even fun at all. “I’m going to put in an extra hour of work,” or, “I’m going to go help my friend move instead of doing that thing because of your value system.” Your monsters and unicorns tell you that’s the thing you want to do.

So that’s about prioritization and, again, seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, but not being indifferent or being selectively indifferent. When I say I’m not particularly interested in sports, I’m selectively indifferent to it. It’s just not something that turns me on. For the most part, I can be dragged to it. It’s fine. Not something I seek out. Like a million other things in life that we don’t seek out. We just don’t seek it out.

A Simple Test for Self-Discovery

I’m trying to drive home the point of how important it is to sort of look inwardly and say, “Am I being lazy or am I being apathetic?” So before we go any further on anything, that sounds like really good homework to have. Are there things in your life that you’re thinking, “I thought I was going to do this by now. I thought I was going to do this,” or, “Why am I struggling so much to get this off the ground, change careers, what have you?”

There’s probably a bunch of things in your life that you’d either like to do or can’t do, and it might be disappointing you.

And here’s the thing. If it’s something that you’re not doing and you should be doing and you really want to do it, but you have some monsters and unicorns in the way, well then that’s something we can get through. And if you read Because, you’re a lot smarter on how to get through that. But if it turns out to be selective indifference, chosen apathy, well, that’s a win. Because now you can stop beating yourself up. You can stop giving yourself a hard time because you’re not doing that thing. “Well, I just don’t… I’m not… I don’t care.”

Does that make se...

What’s Apathy? Who cares.