I’ve been thinking recently that there’s a certain sort of person in the world who could be described as “passionately apathetic”. You know the sort, they remain steadfastly disinterested, apolitical and “unemotional”… until they encounter someone who cares about something and is speaking up about it, in other words, someone who is simply passionate. The passionately apathetic person finds the passionate person intolerable to the point where they can become incredibly angry, vitriolic and judgemental towards them.
My theory is that this is because apathy is often a defence mechanism that comes from a place of fear and anxiety. The passionately apathetic person is terrified of the chaos that comes from emotions and passions of others and afraid of their own internal emotional landscape. They feel the passion of others as a challenge and confrontation to their own constructed apathy.
Genuinely apathetic people simply don’t care. I suspect that passionately apathetic people, on the other hand, are afraid of what caring might mean for them. To care is to open up our heart and being open is being vulnerable. Apathy creates a false sense of security and so when the passionately apathetic person is confronted with genuine passion, they feel the fragility of their own defence mechanisms.
Or… yanno… something.
I was really enjoying this piece, but the ending was the coup de grace