The Care Recession
Caring is not a renewable resource but a strategic response to reciprocity. When systems consistently punish conscientiousness—through stagnant wages despite increased productivity, through layoffs that reward loyalty with abandonment, through bureaucracies that ignore expertise—humans naturally withdraw their emotional investment as psychological self-preservation.
The "who cares" phenomenon isn't moral decay but collective intelligence: society recognising that current structures make caring economically and emotionally unsustainable. We've created a world where caring marks one as exploitable rather than valuable. The rational actor in an irrational system appears irrational only to those who haven't grasped the system's true incentives. Thus, widespread apathy signals not human failure but systemic dysfunction—a canary in the coal mine of institutional legitimacy. People will care again when caring becomes advantageous rather than suicidal.