The cost of whatever
I was hanging out with my nephews when their parents asked one of them a question. The boy answered sloppily, as though pressed into servitude, and with resentment to show for the effort.
His mother, my sister, corrected him.
“Whatever,” he groaned.
Any other parent, if careless, would have laughed the single word off, maybe ascribed it to kids being kids, and to wily kids being cute. Not so my sister and her husband, who refused to fall for a nine-year-old’s bid for rebellion.
“That’s not a nice word,” my sister spoke firmly.
My nephew apologized immediately and answered the original question, this time with precision.
My sister’s scolding was not meant to quash any creative spirit. If anything, it was to reinforce creativity: instead of dismissing her correction, she wanted her son to form thoughts that were more sophisticated than a single word spouted in haste.
She wanted to make her children think for themselves without ignoring what others could bring to a conversation: their backgrounds, knowledge, and experience.
It was her way of telling her children: Don’t dismiss people’s concerns, questions, perspectives, and stories. Listen first, because you will always learn something.
By extension, she was showing her son the importance of words.
He could have simply been laughed at, his single word a mere nothing in the eyes of someone who did not care how a child was raised. My sister, on the other hand, was teaching my nephew that every single word he spoke also represented his character.
To revert to a careless “whatever,” therefore, was to admit to laziness, to enjoy indolence, to value reckless thinking when one had all the ability to discern and produce something of better quality. To say “whatever” was to show that one did not value anyone else’s opinion; that the only opinion that mattered was one’s own.
I’ve observed and mentored three generations of students, and even with the so-called generational divides, all the students I’ve encountered seem to value a version of independence that is deceptively attractive.
It comes in the form of the person who declares, “I don’t care what people think about me,” which is an almost natural extension of “whatever.” This comes with the toxic variant of “I don’t care if people hate me.”
At first glance, these rebels look like they’re out to change the world by battling all social norms. They appear untouched by contradiction, can’t be bothered by other people’s views of what is right and proper, won’t cave in to the crowd.
But taken to its extreme, these are the same people who ignore and dismiss other people’s concerns, who act like they own the workplace and then bully those who don’t adhere to the unwritten rules they enforce.
They are the local officials who disregard or are completely oblivious to the suffering of their constituents, or who claim that they don’t need people’s approval. They either end up doing things that help no one or engage in fraudulent or overpriced projects.
They are the elected government officials who claim that they don’t have to be polite, but are simply afraid to admit that they are crass, boorish, and brutish. They curse, insult, and hurt. They impose disproportionate punishments while invoking the spirit of law and order.
Sometimes the rebels become toxic leaders. Sometimes they end up in The Hague.
The other end of the spectrum is equally problematic. Those who want to please everyone end up pleasing no one. In some cases, they simply follow the rules because they are rules; they refuse to contradict a norm only because it’s been cemented as a tradition. Where the rebels create chaotic change, the people pleasers prevent any real change from happening.
The problem with the idea of “I don’t care what others think” is that it forgets that how and what people think are tied to people’s lives, their stories, their concerns, their dreams. To say that one does not care for people’s approval is to also say that one does not care who people are.
To say that one does not care what people think is to also say that one cannot be bothered to know more about people. In its blindness and deafness to people’s lives, this personality is dangerously close to saying, “I don’t care about people at all.”
Why would we want to work with a person who pushes what they think is best without deeply considering what is right for a specific context, a specific group, a specific moment in time?
For weighty decisions, we don’t need someone unsympathetic. We need someone discerning.
There’s an old phrase for the uncaring attitude: “devil-may-care,” the shortened version of “the devil may care, but I don’t.” While this is conventionally used to talk about a fun, light-hearted person, it also implies indifference. It can refer to a person so uncaring that even the hordes of the underworld would beat them in a compassion contest.
Being worse than demonic is nothing to be proud of. It is simply a sign that one is willing to take everyone else to hell when they’re put in charge.
—————-
iponcedeleon@ateneo.edu
