Hard to Care about Anything

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, a pervasive sense of societal malaise seems to be affecting a significant portion of the population. Journalist and managing editor of Time, Lily Rothman, highlights this trend in her 2022 article, "It’s Harder Than Ever to Care About Anything," where she refers to it with the memorable phrase, the "Great Whatever."

The space between caring about stuff and taking care of people is a small one. Without caring in the first sense, it’s hard to engage in what Richard Weissbourd, a psychologist who serves as faculty director of the Making Caring Common project at Harvard, calls “the harder forms of caring”—that is, action.