The Problem With ‘Not Caring’: How Middle-Aged Women Are Sold Apathy as Self‑Care

Rage and indifference are not liberation.

Not caring feels so much like rest.

After years of caring about everything at once, the body wants to put something down, and the more tired you are the harder it is to choose that thing well. So you put it all down.

Which I believe is how a lot of marriages end.

There is a popular video aimed at middle aged women. A video so popular that it is now a book. The We Do Not Care Club went, as they say, viral. You have probably seen it, or one of the forty versions of it. A woman lists the things she no longer cares about. Pretty much everything. Wearing a bra. Eating certain kinds of foods. What anyone thinks of her. Some funny. Some darker.

The comments on these posts are full of women agreeing. Saying me too, me neither, welcome, finally. It has the warmth of a best friend’s confession and the structure of a recruitment drive.

I understand why it resonates.

There was a time it would have resonated with me too.

And I wonder. Are we all really so exhausted by daily life? Is it that hard to eat more protein and less chips? Are the school’s weekly emails and our partner’s lack of care when handling laundry as heavy as they feel? Are the things the club has quit all that hard?

I don’t think so.

I think we are tired from carrying anger.

Modern women are commanded to be angry. If you aren’t angry about something you have very little to talk about in most women’s friend circles.

Anger has become part of being female.

Anger is not a useless emotion. It is information. When it comes from within you, it tells you a line has been crossed.

But a lot of our collective anger does not come from within.

It comes from online.

This really bothers me. I often challenge female clients to get off of all social media, the news, and take a break from negative friends, even for just a week. Close down all external influences and do some embodiment practices to turn up their inner world.

Guess what?

Often the things they believed were making them angry didn’t bother them much at all. The silent, small things eating up their energy can finally be addressed. I could write for years about how I think a successful modern life is largely about creating a buffer between yourself and everything else.

Especially this messaging to be angry as a form of personal power.

The other aspect is that anger, like all emotions, is meant to move.

You feel it, you let it tell you what it came to tell you, and then it becomes something else. A sentence. A decision. An idea. A desire!

What I see instead is anger held. Socially encouraged to be held. Anger kept in the body so long it goes rotten and cold.

And cold anger does not look like rage. It is confused. It looks like indifference. It looks like a club.

Here is the part that really bothers me about movements like this one.

Every item on the I Do Not Care list is something another woman somewhere is still caring about.

The woman that cares is the joke.

The woman who still makes the food. The woman who still notices. The woman that still nuzzles into her husband’s chest and does her hair before carpool. The obnoxious mom with the color coded calendar.

She sucks. We collectively hate her.

The list makes caring itself look naive, look stupid, look like something you have not yet been beaten out of.

I care about a lot of things now that no one taught me to care about.

I was not raised to think about what energy moves through a house, or what it costs a body to be spoken to a certain way, or what goes into the food before the food goes into a child. I had to learn all of it late and on purpose.

This morning, before my first call, I made bone broth. Not because I am virtuous. Because I have decided that how things feel in my home is mine to tend, and tending is the work, and the work is the point.

Ritualized living matters to me. It has paid off too. I am healthier and happier at 44 than at any other time in my life.

That is what caring actually is. It is not a mood. It is labor.

Caring is the decision to stay responsible for the texture of your own life.

What unsettles me is how quickly this became aspirational. It was not like this when my children were small. The women around me then had hobbies and opinions and things they were building. We chatted about books, careers and recipes.

It was not embarrassing to care. They were not performing how little was left in them. Somewhere that flipped. Now the flex is depletion. Now the woman with nothing left wins.

And the women I watch say this are not, by any visible measure, women in crisis.

They are angry all the time. I have started asking myself, angry at what? And what is their anger doing other than boiling them alive? Is it creating action?

Often the answer is the news. A grief delivered to them hourly by a screen, about events they cannot touch, kept fresh on purpose because their attention is the product.

There is an idea I keep close, that some structures survive only by feeding on the energy of the people caught inside them.

They do not want you happy and they do not want you destroyed. They want you reactive. Angry is reactive.

Not caring is also reactive. (Read that ten times.)

Both keep the body tight, both keep producing the one thing the structure eats. Liberation is supposed to feel like more of your life in your hands. Hands that can create new forms of connection. Permanent low anger does not feel like that. It feels like a body that has forgotten it is allowed to set the screen down.

Some of this gets folded into perimenopause now, which is its own complicated thing.

The body does change. The rage some women describe is real and hormonal and deserves care. But I notice how fast a real bodily transition became a market, and how the marketing rarely sells you back your capacity. It sells you permission to expect less of yourself.

I am not arguing for the old arrangement of being female. No matter how much the red pill bros want it back - it’s not coming. That version earned the burnout.

I am arguing for re-invention that comes from joy and creativity.

Women can not redefine themselves by caring about nothing while angry ranting about what they don’t have. That’s not the answer.

It is caring about fewer things, on purpose, and out loud. So other women can experience what a life being created with no script feels like.

I still care.

I care what goes in the food and what moves through the house and how my voice lands on the people who live with me. I care about my body as a place I have to live for a long time, not a thing I have given up on. I care about my purpose in the world. I care about how people receive me. Caring is not naive. It is not something done to you.

It is the most reliable evidence that you are still the one steering.

The I Do Not Care Club and everything like it has the better marketing. It always will.

Surrender is easy to sell.

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I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com

I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.