On Care

I texted a mentee out of nowhere today, because a podcast reminded me of something I keep forgetting: the people in my life have no idea how much they land on me, and I have no idea how much I land on them. We all walk around underestimating our own weight in each other’s lives. Care is the thing you do once you stop.

I have a four-word version of how I try to treat people: love, care, consideration, being seen. Care is the active one. Love is the feeling; care is what you actually do with it. And what care does underneath is make a person feel seen and considered, which is the same as making them feel they matter. It is a value I keep on my about page: we care, we see, we consider. That is the whole job.

I learned to lead with kindness in Hiroshima. Standing in a place that holds that much loss rearranges what you think is worth your attention. I left certain that the smallest unit of a good life is whether the people near you felt cared for, and care has come first for me since: before honesty, before ambition, before anything.

Here is the part it took research to believe. We are bad at this not because we do not care, but because we misread how care lands. The behavioral scientist Nicholas Epley calls it the prosociality paradox. When we consider reaching out or saying the grateful thing, we fixate on ourselves: will I sound articulate, will this be awkward. The person on the other end is not grading the delivery. They are feeling the warmth. In his work with Amit Kumar, people who wrote letters of gratitude consistently underestimated how surprised and how genuinely happy the recipient would be, and overestimated how awkward it would feel. The gap is large and it runs one way: we undervalue our own care, so we reach out less than we should.

Gordon Flett spent a whole book on the other half of it, a need he calls mattering: the felt sense that you are important to someone, that your being here makes a difference. It is one of the quietest human needs and one of the strongest predictors of whether a person stays resilient or comes apart. The part I did not know is that it is not fixed. You can hand it to someone. Telling a person the specific reason they matter is not a nicety; it is supplying a need.

A young woman I mentored wrote to thank me, and what she said was that I had healed her imposter syndrome, that my words let her walk into her next project sure of herself, and that we had bonded over the upbringing we shared. I would not have predicted any of it. From the inside it felt like ordinary encouragement. From her side it was the thing that let her believe she was doing it right.

So the practice is simple, and it is the hardest thing. Reach out anyway. Send the message you are bracing yourself to send. Tell the person the specific reason they matter to you. You will overestimate the awkwardness every time, and you will underestimate what it does. Care is not only a feeling you have. It is a thing you say out loud to someone who has no idea.

We care, we see, we consider. I want to be a person who does it on purpose, and out loud, while everyone is still here to hear it.