What we choose to care

My wisdom teeth are out and my gums have swollen like worms after rain so much so I mistook it for a sore throat. This physically demarcates the moment where I step out of the puddle of children clothes at my ankles and walk off towards the sunset of adulthood very naked and very afraid. Well, emotional transformation is never a blink-and-you-are-done kind of thing but rather a long process (much like a dreaded dental appointment?) so maybe I am just using the sprouting of my wisdom teeth as a milestone that is much more identifiable.

For the past two years, I am realising my own emotional transition to a state where my emotional breadth and nuances have become reduced. I feel much less intensely compared to primary school me who cried angry tears at the injustices of my teacher who unfairly umpired a dodgeball game, or went home to cry into a pillow from watching a guy’s forehead open up and bleed all over his face. The positive way to put it is that I am learning to be calm instead of having fluctuating emotions at the slightest stimuli, but the flipside of the coin is that I am becoming emotionally inarticulate or that I can no longer be bothered to muster enough strength to get angry or feel the pain of another person.

Perhaps the way I put it across sounds like it’s a bad thing but it’s really not that serious. I dramatize. At least I possess this emotional tool, albeit blunted, rather than not having one at all. Once those rough twigs of immaturity have been filed down and the world no longer hits me with technicolour intensity, the world becomes ruthless in how much easier it is prioritise the task/mission over the more human aspects of living.

Case in point: when I learnt about the Laws of Armed Conflict, I thought to myself that in real life nobody would care about these noble ideals because “all’s fair in love and war”. If we had to choose between defending the civilian’s resources and exposing our troops to possible enemy fire, or if we had to choose between indiscriminate bombing to corner an enemy into surrender and the alternative of following the laws and carry on with a bloody pointless and resource-draining war, the most strategic choice is obvious.

Can we really fault ourselves for using the cost benefit analysis and making the more rational choice? Being mission focused is usually never a bad thing, and even if it does come at a cost of sacrificing some noble beliefs or compromising our humanity it can always be justified by the tangible benefits it did bring. Hence, we make it a value worthy of working towards because it is never absolutely bad – media or history could always defend a mission-oriented leadership if need be.

However, morality exists to make life difficult for ourselves and that is why we must always struggle with what is hard to do. Caring about the intangibles makes us weak. In fact, the more we care about the more we are vulnerable (hence the impression that spies or those in special forces cannot have strings of attachment to the living world). The interesting thing is that many people who said that they woke up with the purpose of defending the nation was because they have a family in Singapore that makes this a home worth defending. The capacity to care and feel may be a potential weakness, but it is powerful in giving us purpose to defend what we call ours.

Pause, and consider what I care about. The narrowing of my emotional tool exacerbated my task-oriented character and already I realise through my responses to questions my tendency to neglect the human dimension. I want to care more about the fluffy things like relationships and ideals. I want to care about this despite it potentially making me less decisive because we are defined by what we choose to care about and it is not good enough (personally) to simply care about the bare minimum. It is what makes a leader more human and it distinguishes them from only effective leaders.

The emergence of my wisdom teeth marks the period where I have steadied my emotions and “matured”, but my questioning and thinking about the use of emotions in decision-making is hopefully a sign that I have also grown more self-aware of the shortcomings of this “maturity”. I want to be deliberate in what I choose to care about because down the road these choices will ultimately define who I am and shape who I will become – and I want to become someone strong/capable enough to defend the many things that I want to care about.