Yes, I did search up the dictionary definition of caring. According to my dear friend Oxford Languages, it’s “to feel concern or interest; to attach importance to something.” Unfortunately, that’s not exactly what my question entails. It’s not just what the definition of the word is, but what it means in our everyday lives.
I have parents. If they are undergoing hardship, I feel responsible to help them. That is a perfect example of caring. But is it?
Let’s say I also care about my grades. I want to get an A in all of my classes. Now, let’s say that even though I care about this, I develop an uncontrolled addiction to YouTube shorts. Because of this, I end up getting B’s in some of my classes. Does that mean that I don’t care about getting an A? Some of you might say no. Your reasoning is likely that I may have cared about getting an A, but the YouTube shorts simply distracted me and disoriented me from getting an A. Some of you might say no, likely because if I had really cared about getting an A, my actions would have reflected in my trying harder to get an A.
From my understanding, we can only measure a person’s care or importance on a subject from two different things. The first benchmark is a person’s thoughts and emotions. The second benchmark is a person’s actions.
Much of the confusion in this has to do with addictions or impulses. For example, if I want to be healthy, but I have a sugar addiction, do I really care about being healthy as much as my sugar addiction? First, we must answer the question of what I care about at all. This is not a situation foreign to what people might experience; in most situations, they do actually care about being healthy. Regardless of whether or not they understand that the sugar addiction is undermining that, it likely does not change.
Now, if we know that the person does in fact care about their health, then we can move on to the sugar addiction. An addiction, from a biological standpoint, means your brain is treating something importantly to the point where it is overemphasizing that importance. This makes you consume more of a thing than you need to. That means that the person does inherently “care” about the addiction, albeit subconsciously. We’ll go into the differences of subconscious and conscious caring later.
Let’s say the person cares about both. Now, what if the person does not know about the negative consequences of eating sugar and does not know it undermines his goal of being healthy. In that case, there’s not too much confusion. He is simply ignorant of the fact that one of the things he cares about is not being tended to. However, what if the person does know that sugar undermines his goal of being healthy? Typically this is what happens.
There are two situations here. Either he stops eating sugar, or he continues eating sugar. If he stops eating sugar after knowing this fact, then it is clear he cares more about his health. However, if he continues eating sugar? Well, that’s a little bit of an issue. If you asked the man what he cares about more, it’s possible he’ll answer that he cares about his health more, because consciously he knows that his health is more beneficial. However, despite this, his actions suggest he places more importance on eating sugar. How do we know which one he cares about more?
This suggests a clash between what is cared about more in terms of when actions do not line up with thoughts and emotions. Of course, this is an example of addiction, so there is a way we can navigate this question, and it has to do with the amazing thing that is your subconscious. Most of the time, an addiction is not an active, conscious thought. Oftentimes, we know the addiction is bad. At a moment when you’re not pursuing the addiction, you can consciously state that you know the addiction is bad and you want to stop. However, when we are pursuing the addiction, what are we actually thinking?
This is where the conversation becomes muddy. You definitely subconsciously care about the addiction, so what do you consciously think? If you consciously think that you want to pursue the addiction, then it contradicts your other moments when you said you don’t want to pursue the addiction. Does your mind gaslight you into forgetting everything?
Now, if you say that you don’t want to pursue the addiction and then you pursue it anyway, then now what do we care about more? I would say that you subconsciously care more about the addiction, but you consciously care more about the other goal. In this case, I make a clear distinction between the subconscious and conscious caring. The reason I can’t really do that in the previous one is because it’s temporally strange. At one point, you consciously care about the goal more than the addiction. However, when you’re in the act of the addiction, do you switch to not caring about the goal and now about the addiction? How does that work?
I think there should be a branch of epistemology or psychology devoted to this, because it’s a weird question that I don’t have an answer to, but there’s not many people online who can clarify it. So, whoever’s reading this, please investigate it.