A Good Kind of Apathy

Photo by Ryan Knapp

Obviously, apathy is awful. I would know as indifference has been a personal struggle. But, I’ve learned a certain amount of not caring can be a good thing. Or at least, it can be a sign of a good thing.

Sometimes, apathy is an indicator of growth. It can be what happens when you start to understand something for what it is instead of what you thought it was. Indifference can be a response to false advertising, a shock that follows radical change in perspective.

For me, one of those major changes was a full-on paradigm shift. When I readjusted the way I thought about the world from a self-determined individualistic view to a God-made gospel view, everything was turned on its head.

The things I thought were the most important became less important. The job I had always thought of myself having became less captivating. Impressing the people I wanted to show off to became less enticing. Even my interests started to feel less intriguing.

That might sound like a bummer, but think of it like this… If you were opening presents on your birthday, and you received an Amazon gift card, you would initially be pretty excited. But then you open another present and it’s keys to a Mustang. In light of having a new car, you might not be as enthusiastic about a gift card like you were a moment before.

I still like all the same things (Star Wars, Batman, writing…) but I don’t love them like I used to. When the focus of life is replaced with the source of life itself, everything else seems a good deal less important. Certain things begin to matter less once you realize what matters most.

If the parts of our lives we thought were the most crucial actually aren’t, then we have less reason to worry about “if it all went wrong.” No matter what happens, it’s not the end of the world.

It’s like when you run into someone famous. (As I’m writing this, Michael Cera walked into the coffee shop I’m at. He’ll inspire this paragraph.) If you wanted to introduce yourself to George-Michael Bluth, you might be anxious at first, maybe because you’re taking the situation more seriously than it deserves. You’re contemplating the possibility of looking bad, or it being awkward.

But when you think clearly and realize it isn’t an experience to take to heart, since you know the One you should take to heart, that anxiety is lessened. You’re excited, but you aren’t overwhelmed. Whoever the celebrity might be, they become just like you, under God’s dominion. That means their opinion of you isn’t defining. Celebrity run-ins are awesome, but they aren’t that dramatic.

With this perspective, we can relax. We can take a step back and breathe. Anxiety loses credibility, because the stakes aren’t so high after all. The “worst case scenario” isn’t the worst case scenario anymore, whether it’s an internship not working out, having to retake a class, or making a subpar impression on Michael Cera… None of them would’ve been life-giving anyway, so none of them are life-threatening.

As the book of Ecclesiastes says, everything under the sun is trivial in the long run. Everything is passing away, so your heart shouldn’t be in this life. It should be in the life to come.

“Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in His wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim, in the light of His glory and grace.”

-Helen Howarth Lemmel

In this way, there’s a good kind of apathy. If you realize what is worth being devoted to, you’ll realize what isn’t worth being devoted to. Some things don’t matter as much as the world might like to think. Not everything deserves your heart. 

Apathy can be toxic. When you don’t see the relevance of things where there is relevance, it threatens your well-being.

But when you don’t see significance where there isn’t any significance, a certain amount of indifference makes sense toward the things God doesn’t want us to completely give ourselves to.

If you value what’s worth valuing, everything else becomes less valuable in contrast. If you know God as beautiful and worthy of praise, everything you previously considered likewise receives a demotion.

I confess that most of my apathy is wrong. Most of it is self-destructive. But by God’s grace, there is a certain amount that I’ve grown from. There is a sort of reasonable indifference. There is a positive kind of apathy that honors the thing of first importance, and pushes you into knowing a truer reality.