From thinking about what makes us care about a story, I wandered further, into what makes us care about anything.
The negatives are easy, from Injustice (anything from Prop 8 to bad tippers) to Tragedy (pick a fatal disease, any fatal disease), obviously we’re going to care about that.
The positives are more difficult. Why do we like what we do? I don’t even know why I like the food I do. None of it is a holdover from childhood, except maybe those sugar cookies with the colored sprinkles, the round sprinkles, not the oblong ones eeuw. Since I rarely ate vegetables or anything I eat now, I can’t use either nostalgia or tradition to justify my preferences.
Tastes change. I won’t say “evolve” because I’m not sure it’s an improvement. But we do care, about a lot of things, or else we’d be dead inside, and we’re not.
So why do we care about the things we choose? How would you even approach an answer to that?
I tried looking at what I care about, what I like, as if I could find a visible pattern. Hey, it was a start.
What do you care about? What things, what causes, what stories, what music? (People with children, please recuse yourselves or focus elsewhere, that’s too easy. Likewise anyone who has successfully loaded Lich King, if you don’t know what that is, be grateful)
You’re an eclectic bunch, whose collective answers would probably charm a statistician, if we all answered honestly and thoroughly--- which we won’t. Never mind. We care because that’s who we are. And I’m the one who coined the phrase “Why doesn’t matter” so I guess I should listen to myself and go back to Pogo where I belong. Thanks for playing.
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3 comments:
um...I like cheese. Does that count?
Not sure it's possible to enumerate all the reasons people might like things, as a lot of them are dependent on the thing in question, but here's a few:
1) Biological - It's sweet, it feels good, it's tasty.
e.g. Cheese, sex, massage.
2) Social - It makes you feel important, validated, or superior to others.
e.g. Exercise, criticism, wealth
3) Psychological - It compensates for something you perceive (though possibly unconsciously) as a personal weakness or rights a perceived injustice, often by making you feel as though your life/circumstances/personality are something different from reality.
e.g. Sexual "conquests", gun ownership, bullying, roleplaying.
I don't really have a satisfactory reason for liking reading, watching movies, and other less definable activities, but I'm sure somebody does.
Talk about covering all the bases! I agree absolutely, but your answer is so complete it almost begs the question. You like watching movies, but cross-reference your own blog, and you'll see you don't like watching ALL movies. (I don't think anyone does.) More specifically, the question should be, why do you like the movies (books, activities, etc) you do? And there never is one clear answer. Not even for cheese.
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