Care

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately interviewing people for a key role. Navigating unbiased evaluation and intuition has been a struggle. Interviews are designed to avoid subjectivity but I can’t help but look for one aspect which outweighs the rest.

I just want to find out how much this person cares.

During an interview today, I was absorbed by how much this candidate cared about learning Blender to design physical objects for his volunteer group — right after we discussed the importance of clever user experiences for elderly people in a digital world transitioning into generative UI.

How much they cared told me everything I needed to know. I could see through their character in that interaction, and vice versa. In the innocuous act of transforming labor into something soulful, care becomes the connecting tissue for good work and character. It acts as the quiet magnet that brings individuals and groups together, and it reveals itself in the smallest gestures.

Did they care to add the page number to the slide?
Did they care to name the variables following the agreed conventions?
Did they care to give a heads up that they were going to be late?

Deliberate at its core, simple in idea, yet hard to live up to.

I occasionally lament a world that is becoming increasingly careless, but the jeremiad quickly disappears when I witness dignity, passion and craftsmanship.

Like when I was back in Cayenne for Christmas during my last year of university and spoke to this old lady who had never been to Metropolitan France. She was praising me for my courage while I aspired to one day feel as content as she was.
Or when I hear the stories of Chinese elders in London feeling homesick but taken care of by a young and resourceful generation.
And that one friend who moved to Chile at 16 because he wanted to perfect his Spanish and soccer skills, then worked as a sous-chef at Michelin-starred restaurants because food was his next obsession.

In each, I felt care radiating as a calm devotion.

In a modern society that feels fragmented and alienating at times, I look towards care to restore meaning. Caring is thankless, yet has to be practiced lavishly.

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”

— David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

Caring for something, anything, is a privilege.

I’ve been lucky to be surrounded by people who care — about family, about craft, about equality and empowerment.

Anything worthwhile begins with care. My hope is that people around me find something worth caring for – enough to keep them up at night not from dread, but from excitement and duty. That they find the tribe they belong to, that shares the same care — and when they do, that it gives them the purpose, discipline and drive to achieve and make something beautiful.

Because there are many ways to express our gratitude to the world, and the purest way is to care to make a difference for others. We may never shake their hands, know their name or their story — but we will have transmitted something out of love and care.

Going back to picking people — because that’s how this piece started — I want to be with people who choose intentionality over routine. Generosity over indifference. Care over apathy.

I’ll do everything to deserve it. That’s what care means.