”Why do you care so much, Erik?” My classmate asked. He continued: ”The more you care, the more easily you get hurt. That’s why it’s easier not to care.”

My classmate had a point. My caring led me into a lot of pain and hardship. I got involved in politics as a young teenager. I fought for world peace and got into many arguments and conflicts as a result. At the young age of 20, I got into a burnout while campaigning for lowering working hours and while telling other people to spend more time in nature. I didn’t see the irony of that at the time, but I do now.

I also know what it’s like in the aftermath: to isolate yourself from your friends and family, to live on your own, and to build walls around your heart and your passion. I know how heavy the armor of detachment is. Closing myself off did protect me from suffering, but it also made me feel less alive.

So if I met my classmate today, I would say the following: ”Not caring is the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do.”

Since I was born, I’ve been learning how to care for myself and others; I’ve been in a lifelong process of discovering my values, what I want, and why. It hasn’t always been easy. Sometimes, I get into a negative inner self-dialogue, and I don’t like myself very much. At other times, I get stuck in a bad spiral and complain to my wife about my colleagues and my job. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that way.

There are times when I struggle to care for myself and others. Living in the Netherlands, it rained constantly, and for a long time, the grey skies got in the way of my mood. But today, I look at rain as something beautiful and peaceful. And I remember being a child. When I was a child, I’d jump in rainpuddles. Then, rain brought me joy.

I’m learning to dance in the rain. I’m learning to care. I’m learning to be a more loving partner, to be more kind and supportive to my colleagues, and toward nature. Why do I want to care? Because I’m starting to think that love is the point. The love of myself, my feelings, and my thoughts is the goal in and of itself.

How I Learned to Care

Caring isn’t simple. There are times when we don’t want to understand a person. Times when people frustrate us. Times when we frustrate ourselves.

When I don’t like myself, I start to label myself. I might call myself mean names. Other times, I search for explanations. I want to understand, but I can’t. Is it because I’m an introvert? Is it because he’s an extrovert?

I wanted to understand people so that I could connect with them better. So I spent more than a decade studying personality psychology, sociology, and communication.

My studies taught me a lot. Sometimes, it gave me words and a vocabulary for complex feelings and sensations. Other times, it gave me an interesting theory on why people behave the way that they do. It was a good starting point. I made videos sharing my insights, and people said that it helped. It felt like a way to care for and help others.

But while the theories helped me connect with some, it made me more distant from others. I thought the theory just wasn’t accurate enough. That I just needed a better theory, a more precise word. But that just wasn’t the case. No theory would explain everything about a person.

I’ve come to believe that categories and labels are healthy and normal. They give me useful words and descriptions, but just of what is on the surface. In conversations, my brain is quick to label and categorize people, but I train my attention to focus on things beyond the first labels and assumptions. I try to find the things underneath a person: the hidden intentions, the unspoken thoughts, the unfelt feelings. The potential waiting to be discovered. And that’s when I transcend the frustration and see the more beautiful human reality of a person.

I started to learn to love a person’s contradictions: the emotions that couldn’t be explained, and the thoughts that didn’t fit.

In part, this book marks my shift from theory to real, lived experience.