Apathy and Indifference

You can't convince the careless to start caring.

April 02, 2026

Hypothetically, let’s say you are an unpopular blogger well over a decade after blogging stopped being something self-styled “serious people” took seriously. Let’s say on top of that that you are a software developer who prioritizes creating minimal solutions that users and developers alike can wrap their heads around. Cherry on top—let’s say you abhor LLM chatbots and would never stoop so low as to use one because you think it would only devalue your work.

Let’s say, you wanted to convince people to start putting more thought and care into what they do. Who is your main target audience?

If your guess is those who are indifferent: you are mistaken.

Consider for a moment why I think that might be the case. Consider for a moment how you might approach trying to convince an indifferent person to adopt your viewpoints.

You could spend hours explaining that considerate code will cost less to maintain and create fewer downstream issues. They don’t care.

You could bring up piles of user research showing without a doubt that users cope better with interfaces that are straightforward. It won’t matter.

You could confront a 10× engineer about how their style of work creates negative value for the company. No change.

You could confront the 10×'s boss with concrete data on how they are a money pit. It’s like talking to a brick wall.

What kind of argument could get through to someone who is indifferent? None. Someone who doesn’t care won’t listen to arguments they don’t care about and your arguments can’t be reframed from an angle they care about because someone who doens’t care about anything, doesn’t care about anything.

So, then, who do you appeal to?

It’s simple: those with learned apathy. Those who are becoming apathetic. Those who are burnt out from trying to do things that matter with few positive results.

In other words, people who care but might find it difficult to put that care into practice right about now.

Those who care will listen to reasonable arguments. They’ll even listen to unreasonable arguments, often gleefully tearing them down if they’re novel enough to earn such a passionate response.

But why would this make a difference?

Competence and passion are being attacked from all angles. Those who go above and beyond to deliver great work are finding themselves unemployed for refusing to use garbage tools even when mandated by their employer. It takes the exact opposite mindset of indifference to stay dedicated to quality in spite of artificially-imposed consequences. This is who should be encouraged in an age of technical indifference.

In other words, encourage the passionate. Learn from them. Support and value their work. Take care of those who care, because the best way to fight apathy and indifference is to prevent them from happening in the first place.