closer to the sun
in defence of caring (sometimes too much)
And just like that, June lolls its tongue, letting out one last sticky breath like a panting dog.
My last week has been dominated by a big work event - the Glastonbury of sustainable materials, if you will. Except instead of stages, it’s exhibition booths, and mercifully, cleaner toilets with proper plumbing. You still had to queue for half an hour in an unshaded heat trap for food that costs a small fortune, but this is London in 2025, after all.
For someone whose role is to communicate about what our company does, most of my work happens behind a screen. I’m a faceless voice. But here I was, a face, representing my company (alongside my colleagues) in person at “The largest dedicated showcase for sourcing certified, sustainably and responsibly produced materials.” As someone who generally prefers to sit in the corner with people I already know at parties, rather than mingle and mix in the crowds, it’s safe to say this pulled me out of my Comfort Zone. This isn't a LinkedIn post, so let me just say: I survived. (Maybe even thrived, just a little bit.)
I was relieved to realise, pretty early on, that even in this intensely professional environment, it was still just a room of people being people. Yes, they were doing their jobs, and I was doing mine. Yes, they had business interests and business cards and threw questions about products and pricing at me, with commercial intent swirling around most of the conversations.
But underneath all that, they also enjoyed being asked how their day was going, what first got them interested in this space, or what else they’d seen at the event that had inspired them. The less invasive equivalent of imagining people naked to feel less nervous when talking to them is perhaps imagining them as exactly what they are: whole people.
I also realised pretty early on that if I felt out of my depth in a conversation, there were people from my team around to step in and help, provide a better answer to a difficult question, or deflect the conversation to safer territory.
Working at an impact-led startup puts me in the thick of work powered by People Who Care. Every job has its stereotypes (and exceptions to them), but when your job sits at the intersection of “trying to save the world” and “building something new from scratch,” it generally draws a particular kind of person - the kind with large reserves of care.
Which has me thinking about a more general principle for getting on well in life:
Surround yourself with good people who care a lot.
That sentence might feel incomplete: surround yourself with good people who care a lot about what? But I don’t actually think the “about” part matters as much as we think it does. In my work anecdote, it’s good people who care a lot about transforming textiles and the fashion industry from polluting and poisoning superpowers to forces of good in the world.
More broadly, I worry we're in a crisis of not caring enough, of being too cool to care, because it's much easier to brush everything off and numb ourselves than to show our hand, lean in and invest.
In her book The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker writes about the ‘coolness complex’ that affects hosts who want to appear easy and laidback to their guests:
This modesty is related to a desire not to seem like you care too much—a desire to project the appearance of being chill, cool, and relaxed about your gathering. Gathering well isn’t a chill activity. If you want chill, visit the Arctic.
I think you can extrapolate the same principle out of hosting and into, well, everything. The point is not hiding behind this veil of ‘coolness,’ pretending it’s cool not to care. Having the capacity to care - to put yourself out there, stick your neck on the line, push the boundaries of your Comfort Zone in service to something - might just be the next CAPTCHA. Proof that you’re human, not a bot, not numb.
It could be in service to a mission, like the people I work with and other impact-driven professionals. It could be a passion, like talking about colouring with sports-rivalry intensity. Learning a new language, volunteering in your local community, hell, even just caring enough to squeeze out as much joy as possible from each human interaction.
The image of a ladder comes to mind. Caring only a little bit translates to standing on the bottom rung, only, ever. Not letting yourself climb higher because you think that if you fall, you'll soften the blow by being closer to the ground - less distance to fall, less of a bruise when you land with a bump. Caring more is climbing further up the ladder; with each rung, you're taking on more potential to fall and increasing the risk of hurting yourself.
Much easier to play it safe and not care too much, right?
But who says you're going to fall?
There's a scene in Due Date with Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Galifianakis where Zach's character falls asleep at the wheel of a car. They crash, obviously, and spectacularly so. Zach, who was fast asleep and loose-limbed when their car rolled off a bridge, comes out unscathed, but Robert's character, who was wide awake, panicked and all seized up during the crash, came out with a broken arm.
If that cinematic moment teaches us anything, perhaps it’s that there is a real survival benefit to being loose and easy, even/especially in high-stress situations or out-of-Comfort Zone scenarios. Leaning in, letting yourself be taken by the experience and not resisting can prevent damage from being done. But here’s the twist: perhaps paradoxically, I think this looseness can actually come from a place of caring more rather than one of indifference.
The reason being, it’s actually quite hard to be indifferent. It’s hard to maintain thick walls and barriers, to be unaffected by things. Humans are simply not made that way - we're porous creatures, social creatures, so resisting the impulse to care takes more effort, not less. It’s like telling yourself you’re not going to think about that thing that’s occupying too much real estate in your mind, and proceeding to use up more mental energy in the not-thinking-about-the-thing.
A yoga teacher might call it surrender. And that surrendering is easier when you surround yourself with good people who also care a lot. Being able to lean in, to show your cards, to trust the people around you are there to soften the blow, or lift you, is a beautiful thing.
To care at all about things, big things or silly little things, in a world and a moment where it feels like every news notification is trying to make us completely desensitised (because honestly, that can feel like the easiest response).
To keep caring is radical. It’s a sign that the algorithms won’t win, the robots won’t win, the billionaires won’t win, because there will be enough thinking, feeling, caring humans out there.
No, it’s not a sign, it’s a strategy.
The “about” doesn't matter as much as the act of caring itself. What matters is finding those people who care as much as you do and sticking close to them, because in an attention economy and click-bait culture that's trying to make us all too cool or too numb to care, surrounding yourself with people who haven't gotten the memo might just be the simplest way to fly a little closer to the sun.
Some other thoughts on care curated with the help of :
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
Jack Gilbert
Caring about everything is a disaster.
Caring about nothing is also a disaster.
Nurture the small pocket of things that truly matter to you.
James Clear
Care is about intention, patience, and impact. It’s the opposite of scalability; scalability is when you don’t care, when you think that the same user experience should be applied to everyone on earth.
Kyle Chayka
CULTURE: from the Latin cultus, which means care.
Daniel Coyle
Caring personally is the antidote to both robotic professionalism and managerial arroganice. Why do I say “caring personally” instead of just “caring”? Because it’s not enough to care about the person’s work or the person’s career. Only when you actually care about the whole person with your whole self can you build a relationship.
Kim Scott
You can choose to immerse yourself in things you might come to care about and so begin to change your life.
Kieran Setiya
Caring is an independent primary variable. You have to care first before agreeing or disagreeing can mean anything. And to do that you have to have surplus capacity to care beyond caring about yourself, by working the “caring muscle.”
Venkatesh Rao
