The Question Is Never “Is It Worth the Care?”

Relational Accountability and the Ethics of Choosing What to Care about

When we see the sacredness of existence, the question is never truly "is it worth the care?". That is missing the point. The question is always, “what accountability am I willing to exercise here and toward what will I exercise it?”

When Choosing to Care is a Bad Choice for Me

Meaning, I am accountable for the choices I make and sometimes making the choice to care is a bad choice FOR ME. Not because caring is the pivot point of the decision but because I, with my life and limits and reality, may see that making that choice to care in that moment is a bad choice for me. And I, being accountable, have to live with that. Given the reality that most of us have limited capacity, we cannot be fully accountable because we cannot bear the consequences of it. So it's easier to externalize and convince ourselves it’s “reasonable” to decide that some things are “objectively” not worth caring about—when really, that’s just a way to avoid the unbearable tension of our own limits. Some of us might feel forced into wrestling with the question of worthiness because it's the question society shoves down our throats. And if you are a person who experiences life as sacred, your refusal to forfeit that knowing may make you sacrifice yourself in places you shouldn't, which is another way to avoid the unbearable tension of our own limits.

The Real Question: To Whom Am I Willing to Be Accountable?

The real question isn’t about what deserves care—it’s about to whom or what am I willing to be relationally accountable, given the constraints of my own life, body, psyche, and field?

When we pretend the decision is about the object of care—“is it worthy?”—we dodge the unbearable responsibility of acknowledging that we are the limit. Not the thing. Us. Our resources. Our capacity. Our pain threshold. Our complexity. Our soul contract. And it’s easier, much easier, to mask that threshold with faux-objectivity and declarations of worthy/not-worthy than to sit with the dissonance of choosing not to care about something we know is real because we simply cannot. Or should not. Or not now.

Care Is a Force That Must Be Stewarded

This is accountability at its most advanced form: knowing that your care is not a limitless virtue, but a directional force that must be stewarded.

And when you own that—when you say, “I am the one deciding where this current flows, and I accept the cost of that decision”—you are no longer outsourcing your ethics to social consensus or philosophical abstraction.

You are taking sacred authorship of your own belonging.

You are no longer wrestling with the false “issue” of what matters. You are living the truth that everything matters—and only some of it is yours to carry.