The Myth of Caring Too Much

You don't need to care less about your job to feel OK

At the peak of one of the hardest projects of my career, I came into work one morning looking exhausted from working late to finish an analysis. Sweatpants-clad and disheveled, I immediately sparked alarm. 

Concerned about the hours I’d been working and my unhelpful meeting contributions that day, several colleagues offered me some well-intentioned but unwelcome advice. “You care too much about work,” they insisted. I had heard this before.

At numerous points throughout my career, peers have diagnosed me with a horrible case of “caring too much.” 

Symptoms: long hours and occasional doom spirals. 

Prognosis: eventual burnout. 

Cure: care less.

Every time I’ve heard this advice, it’s landed poorly with me. Caring a lot is sort of my bit, and it feels patronizing to be told to stop it. More importantly, caring less about work is simply bad advice. 

The Trouble With Caring Less

Here is my challenge to those who subscribe to the gospel of “caring less”: show me a person who has ever succeeded at something because of how little they cared.

More than any other skill or trait, the one thing that most successful entrepreneurs, athletes, performers, politicians, and professionals have in common is not an absence of care but an unusual abundance of it. Caring is the lifeblood of success. It stops us from quitting when things get uncomfortable or when the odds get bad. It drives us to make sacrifices that other people wouldn’t in order to reap rewards that most people won’t. Caring (a lot) is what inspires others to join us and stand by us because they know we won’t give up. And if you’ve ever heard that you need a “why” behind what you do, how much you care correlates 1:1 with how much mileage you’ll get out of that why. 

Truly, if there was a universal recipe for getting what you want in your life and career, a metric ton of care might be the single most important ingredient. 

Caring about your work is also just the decent thing to do. When you sign up for a job, you are agreeing to be part of a collective of people who are trying to achieve something bigger than you. And while our culture seems to be breeding a loathing toward even trace quantities of interpersonal obligation, when you take a job, you do owe somebody something. You owe your teammates and the people who depend on you your very best effort.

In any organization, there’s a critical mass of care that must exist on the team for work to get done. When one person decides to care less about the work, the team cannot survive with a net decrease in their shared concern. Instead, someone else who cares more has to take on the displaced responsibility for making sure work is done well. This arrangement is viable for just keeping the trains on the tracks. But it cannot sustainably produce excellent work. People who don’t care can accomplish good enough work, but they are unlikely to deliver game-changing, growth-fueling, metric-moving work. Over time, the presence of people who don’t care enough becomes a weight on high-performers who are likelier to pick up the slack, creating a general cascade of team dysfunction and underperformance. 

Choosing not to care about work generates shockwaves of collateral damage, and beyond hurting the careers of the people who choose to do it, it can also deplete the health of whole teams. 

Most crucially, even if your goal is just to manage your stress and get by at work, the most important thing to know before you take the advice to care less about your job is that it doesn’t work. 

The Alternative to Caring Less

Buried inside the idea of caring less is a valuable nugget of insight: For many people, work has a ruinous chokehold on their emotions. It dysregulates, overstimulates, and emotionally consumes them in ways that really do lead to burnout and emotional distress. But what makes these people susceptible to work’s emotional dangers is not how much more deeply they care about their work; it’s how poorly they manage their emotions. 

Work through a hypothetical with me. Alan and Carrol (because I’ve never worked with people with either of these names) both work at a mission-driven climate tech company that they’re passionate about. 

Alan is obsessive about his job. He clocks late hours, takes on as much work as possible to ensure the company's success, and always produces exceptional work products.  Carrol’s peers describe her the same way. She thinks about work all the time, takes every opportunity to go the extra mile, and helps others on the team ensure their work is good, even when it’s not her job. 

But the similarities end there. 

When asked about Alan, his coworkers unanimously agree he cares too much—and it’s harming him and the team. When projects don’t work out, Alan takes it to heart. An underwhelming product launch can leave him dejected and overly pessimistic about new ideas. He’s quick to anger when other people don’t meet his expectations, making him hard to work with. He cancels social plans regularly because he feels guilty about doing anything but work, even though he’s always ahead of deadlines. Alan wants to feel more balanced and make time to do other things, but most days, he’s so depleted from work that all he feels like doing is ordering delivery and scrolling until he falls asleep. 

Carrol’s coworkers say the opposite. They find her commitment to the job motivating for the whole team and feel like they can count on her. Despite finding time to help others with their work, Carrol is a pro at differentiating between high and low-urgency problems. When projects go off track, she focuses on looking for new solutions. She doesn’t take it personally when a launch doesn’t go as planned, and when she’s stretched too thin, she takes time off to return recharged. Carrol takes negative feedback in stride because she wants to do her best, and she comes home from work most days feeling tired but content. 

While Alan and Carrol’s coworkers would both say they care deeply about their jobs, what differentiates Carrol as an employee and helps her progress in her career is not a lesser commitment or attachment to work. What Carrol has, and Alan lacks, is the emotional skill to navigate conflict, disappointment, stress, and failure. 

If you feel like an Alan while wishing you could be a Carrol, without those same emotional skills, caring less will not make the difference. 

I look back on the times people told me I needed to care less, and it’s clear to me that it’s never what they really meant. I wasn’t defeated over a leadership decision I disagreed with because I care about my job too much; I was defeated because I needed to build a higher tolerance for the feeling of being out of control. When I agonized over tasks that didn’t matter, it wasn’t because of my commitment to my team; it was because I was insecure about my value at work and worried that if I did a single thing wrong, people would think less of me. While both of these feelings were arguably side effects of being twenty-four, emotionally dissociating from work wouldn’t have resolved them. What caused people to stop telling me to care less was developing the self-confidence to let the small things slide and the emotional regulation skills to navigate work’s inevitable negative encounters. 

Caring deeply, when accompanied by intentional efforts to build emotional resilience and control, is an unparalleled career accelerant. So before you decide to check out in meetings, pack up at 5 every day (even if the work’s not done), or phone it in because it’s the only way you know how not to be disappointed; remember that it’s possible to care a lot and be okay. And while caring a lot and managing your feelings doesn’t guarantee you’ll succeed, choosing to care less about your work and your job will guarantee you won’t.

We’ll talk more about it soon. Thanks—always—for reading.