Why We Pretend Not to Care

The Best Acting of My Life

Some of the best acting of my life happened when I was younger.

Not because I was trying to fool people into thinking I was somebody I wasn’t. If anything, I’ve always struggled to be anything other than myself. Most of that acting happened afterward. It came from pretending not to care when something actually bothered me.

Getting rejected by girls was probably the most common example. I can’t even remember all of them anymore, but I remember the feeling. You find out someone doesn’t like you the way you hoped they would, and then you try to play it off like it doesn’t matter. Maybe you joke about it. Maybe you act like you never cared in the first place. Maybe you convince yourself you’ll laugh about it later.

The truth is most of us cared a lot more than we admitted.

Some of the moments that stuck with me weren’t even things people said directly to my face. Those were easier to deal with. At least then you knew what you were dealing with. What hurt more were the comments you accidentally overheard. The ones people never intended for you to hear.

I remember playing a backyard football game one time when a guy asked my friends who the ugly dude was on our team the last time we played against them. The funny thing was there were only two people he could’ve possibly been talking about, and the other guy was friends with him. I knew exactly who he meant.

I remember standing there realizing my friends knew who he meant too.

Coming from who it did, I had plenty of thoughts about his qualifications for judging anybody else’s appearance, but that’s not really what stayed with me.

At the time, I did what a lot of guys do. I acted like I didn’t care. I took some of my frustration out during the game and probably hit him a little harder than necessary a few times. One thing I’m sure of, though, is that any pain I caused him that day on the field probably faded long before the embarrassment I carried home with me.

Looking back now, I don’t think what bothered me most was being called ugly. It was knowing that other people were standing there when it happened. It was the embarrassment of it. The feeling of suddenly becoming the punchline in a conversation you didn’t even know was taking place.

I never let him see that it bothered me.

But pretending something doesn’t hurt and not being hurt are two completely different things.

 

When Caring Becomes Impossible to Hide

Here’s the contradiction. Outside of moments like those, I was never very good at pretending not to care.

That’s actually one of the contradictions I keep coming back to while writing this.

If I strip away all the pride and excuses, what I wanted wasn’t much different than what most people want. I wanted to be accepted. I wanted people to like me. I wanted girls to like me. I wanted friends. I wanted to fit in. If I’m being honest, there were plenty of times I tried too hard to make people happy.

What I wasn’t very good at was being fake.

There seems to be a difference between wanting approval and changing who you are to get it. I definitely spent parts of my life wanting approval. I think most people do. But I could never keep up an act for very long.

It probably cost me sometimes.

There were conversations I had that would’ve been smarter to avoid. There were things I opened up about that probably made me look too emotional, too invested, or too needy. I usually knew it while I was doing it too. I knew there were moments where being more detached would’ve made me seem cooler or more attractive.

I wrote about something similar in How Vulnerability Became Dangerous for Men. Somewhere along the way, many of us learn that the safest thing to do is pretend we don’t care quite as much as we do.

The problem was that I wasn’t detached. No matter how hard I tried, I could never maintain that cool, unaffected image for very long. Even when I tried to hide it, I wasn’t very good at carrying it for long.

As I’ve gotten older, I don’t regret that nearly as much as I used to. I’ve watched people spend years trying to become whoever they think the room wants them to be. Maybe it works. Maybe it even makes them more popular.

But I think there’s a cost to that too.

When I look back at my own life, I don’t see someone who pretended not to care. I see someone who cared deeply about a lot of things and occasionally got hurt because of it.

Maybe that’s part of why I write now.

The older I get, the more I think writing is just another way of refusing to pretend.

 

When Pretending Not to Care Stops Working

One place I was never very good at pretending not to care was relationships.

Sometimes it happened all at once. A girl would say something nice, show a little interest, and suddenly I’d turn into “Tommy Boy” right before he talked himself out of a sale. I would get excited, start talking too much, reveal way more than anyone asked for, and somehow manage to create problems that didn’t exist five minutes earlier.

Other times it happened more slowly.

A girl would start pulling away. Calls wouldn’t get returned as quickly. Messages would sit unanswered a little longer. The energy would change, and even before I could prove anything was wrong, I could usually feel it. That’s when I’d start trying to figure out what happened. I’d ask if everything was okay. I’d wonder if I did something wrong. In my head, I was trying to save something that felt like it was slipping away. Looking back, it probably looked a lot more desperate than I intended.

The worst part is that I usually knew exactly what I was doing.

I wasn’t clueless. I wasn’t sitting there wondering why things weren’t working. I could practically watch myself making the mistake in real time and still couldn’t stop myself from doing it. It felt like watching a slow-motion train wreck that I was somehow helping push down the tracks.

The older version of me likes to laugh at those moments now, but the pattern was pretty obvious. If something mattered to me, it usually showed. Whether I kept my mouth shut or not, people eventually knew what mattered to me. I never seemed to have much talent for hiding it. Some people are good at playing it cool. I never really had that gift.

Maybe that’s why I appreciate my wife so much.

I never had to convince her to care. I never had to wonder where I stood. She didn’t disappear for three days and wait to see how I’d react. She didn’t play games. She didn’t make me guess. We treated each other with respect from the beginning.

Because of that, I got to be the version of myself that most people know today. Calm. Steady. Reasonable.

People who meet me now would probably never guess how much of my younger years were spent trying to act like I wasn’t affected by things that clearly affected me.

 

The Part That Still Makes Me Cringe

When I think back on those situations now, I don’t spend much time thinking about the girls themselves.

Most of them are long gone memories at this point.

What I remember is how I acted.

By that point in my life, I already had a pretty clear picture of who I thought I was. I was the funny guy in the group. The guy who got along with everybody. The guy who usually kept things light.  I don’t think I was all that different from most kids in that regard.

For the most part, I thought I did a pretty good job of it too.

That’s probably why those moments stand out so much.

Not because I was the worst offender. Not because I was constantly chasing people away. If anything, those moments were relatively rare. But when they happened, they felt completely out of character.

Part of what made those moments so frustrating was that I had friends who seemed to handle things differently. They always looked calm. A girl lost interest and they’d shrug their shoulders and move on. Somebody said something insulting and it never seemed to stick with them the way it stuck with me.

Maybe they were better at letting things go. Maybe they were better actors than I was. I honestly don’t know.

What I do know is that I spent a lot of years comparing my reactions to theirs and wondering why things seemed to affect me more than they affected everybody else.

I had this picture in my head of who I was. I thought I was a guy who was calm, confident, and in control of himself. A guy who didn’t get rattled easily. A guy who could take a hint, move on, and keep his dignity intact.

Then every once in a while, life would hand me evidence to the contrary.

That’s probably what bothered me most.

The rejection itself usually faded after a few days. What stayed with me longer was the feeling that I hadn’t handled it the way I wanted to. I knew how I thought I should act. I knew how my friends seemed to act. Yet every now and then I’d find myself getting caught up in my feelings and becoming somebody I didn’t particularly admire.

For someone who spent a lot of his life trying to fit in, be accepted, and be part of the cool crowd, those moments had a way of sticking with me. Not because I lost the girl, but because I felt like I had lost myself. The embarrassment of how I acted often lasted far longer than the rejection itself.

Maybe that’s another reason people pretend not to care.

Sometimes admitting we care means admitting we’re not always the person we imagine ourselves to be.

 

It Still Gets To Me Sometimes

One of the benefits of getting older is that you eventually realize not everything is about you.

When I was younger, I probably took things more personally than I should have. These days I’m much better at giving people the benefit of the doubt. Maybe somebody is having a bad day. Maybe they were trying to be funny and missed the mark. Maybe they didn’t mean what I thought they meant.

Life has a way of thickening your skin if you stick around long enough.

That doesn’t mean things never get to you.

Even now, there are moments that can rattle me for a minute. Sometimes it’s something small. A post that gets less engagement than I hoped. A video that stalls out. An article that I thought would connect with more people than it did.

The difference is that I don’t stay there as long as I used to.

When you’re younger, one negative comment can outweigh ten positive ones. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to zoom out a little more. Most adults aren’t sitting around waiting for my next blog post or video. They’re busy trying to survive their own lives. The same way I am.

I wrote about that reality in The Exhaustion of Trying to Better Yourself After Work. Most people are carrying far more than we realize, which is one of the reasons I’ve gotten better at not taking everything so personally.

I’ve also learned that disappointment isn’t always a sign that something is wrong. Sometimes it’s just evidence that I cared about the outcome. If I spend hours writing an article and hope people connect with it, of course I’m going to feel something when they don’t. If I put together a video and nobody watches it, there will probably be a moment where I question whether it was worth the effort.

The difference now is that I don’t let those moments define me.

Years ago, I might have treated a disappointing outcome as proof that I wasn’t good enough. Now I mostly see it for what it is. One article. One video. One opinion. One moment. Life is too big to build your identity around any single one of those things.

And when I do start getting inside my own head, I have something now that I didn’t always have when I was younger. Perspective. I also have a long list of people who have supported me, encouraged me, and believed in me when I struggled to believe in myself.

The older I get, the more I realize both things can be true at the same time. You can grow thicker skin and still get hurt. You can become more confident and still have insecurities. You can know better and still feel something when disappointment shows up.

Maybe that’s what growth actually is. Not becoming someone who never gets hurt. Just learning not to stay hurt as long.

 

Would I Change It If I Could?

That’s a question I’ve asked myself more than once over the years.

My wife has an ability to ignore things that I’ve always admired. Whether somebody likes her, agrees with her, or approves of her decisions doesn’t seem to occupy much space in her head. Sometimes I joke that she’s either the greatest actor of all time or she genuinely doesn’t care what most people think.

After all these years, I think it’s probably the second one.

There are times I’ve wished I was more like that.

Life can be exhausting when you feel everything. When criticism sticks around longer than it should. When a careless comment from years ago still manages to find its way back into your thoughts. When you’re constantly trying to balance your own feelings with everyone else’s.

It would probably be easier not to care so much.

At least that’s what I’ve told myself.

The problem is that I’m not sure I’d still be me.

For better or worse, caring about people has shaped a lot of my life. It influenced the friendships I chose, the way I raised my kids, the way I approached relationships, and probably the reason I sit down and write articles like this in the first place.

I’ve gotten better at putting things into perspective as I’ve gotten older. Things that would’ve bothered me for a week might bother me for an hour now. That’s growth.

But becoming completely indifferent was never really in the cards for me.

At some point you stop trying to become a different person and start learning how to be a healthier version of the person you’ve always been.

 

Why We Pretend Not to Care

If my son came home tomorrow upset because somebody embarrassed him, rejected him, or hurt his feelings, I don’t think I’d tell him not to care.

I’d probably tell him that people are complicated. Sometimes the people who hurt others are carrying things we can’t see. I’d tell him to stand up for himself. I’d tell him not to let people walk all over him. It’s okay to be kind. It’s not okay to be a doormat.

The truth is that none of that requires pretending not to care.

That’s probably what I’ve been trying to figure out while writing this.

For years, I thought the goal was becoming one of those people who seemed unaffected by everything. The kind of person who could let criticism roll right off their back. The kind of person who never replayed conversations in their head or wondered what other people thought.

My wife is probably the closest person I’ve ever met to that. I’ve been around her long enough to know she’s not putting on an act.

Sometimes I’ve wished I was more like that.

But the older I get, the less certain I am.

Because when I look back on my life, I can’t help but wonder what else would’ve been different if I truly didn’t care what people thought.

Would I have been a better version of myself?

Maybe.

Or maybe I would’ve been less empathetic. Maybe I would’ve paid less attention to the people around me and spent less time trying to understand why people do the things they do.

I even wonder if I’d be writing at all.

A lot of my writing comes from paying attention, overthinking things, replaying conversations, and trying to make sense of experiences that stuck with me. Sometimes that’s exhausting. Sometimes it drives me crazy. But it also gives me something to write about.

Maybe caring too much caused some problems in my life. I think it probably did. But when I look back, I’m not convinced it only caused problems.

What I do know is that pretending not to care never made me stronger. It just made me a better actor.

And some of the best acting I’ve ever done happened when I was younger.

 

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