Caring Is Creepy

When I'm in a pondering mood, I listen to "Caring Is Creepy" by The Shins and mull over the following lyrics:

I think I'll go home and mull this over

Before I cram it down my throat

At long last it's crashed, its colossal mass

Has broken up into bits in my moat.

Lift the mattress off the floor

Walk the cramps off

Go meander in the cold

Hail to your dark skin

Hiding the fact you're dead again

Undeneath the power lines seeking shade

Far above our heads are the icy heights that contain all reason

It's a luscious mix of words and tricks

That let us bet when we know we should fold

On rocks i dreamt of where we'd stepped

And of the whole mess of roads we're now on.

Hold your glass up, hold it in

Never betray the way you've always known it is.

One day I'll be wondering how

I got so old just wondering how

never got cold wearing nothing in the snow.

This is way beyond my remote concern

Of being condescending

All these squawking birds won't quit.

Building nothing, laying bricks.

Every time I listen to this song, I ask the same question to myself at the end: Is it more worth it to not care and feel protected or to care and feel vulnerable? Clearly certain events in life make it easy to become numb in order to block out the pain. But what benefit does that alternative give you in the long run? If all you know is to be numb to something, what happens when something happens in your life that should make you really happy and you don't feel anything?

On the other hand, deciding to care about every little detail, every up and down, every right turn and wrong turn in life causes the scary feeling of vulnerability. When you're vulnerable, everything feels magnified; the good things in life make you feel so high that you're worlds away from reality, and the bad things in life cause a pain that is so bitingly raw that all you want to do is curl up in a ball. But with these intensified feelings, you come to a new truth: whether the emotion is good or bad, you've never felt so alive.

So which will you choose? You can either choose to live your life in a state of numbness and never get hurt, or you can live your life with feeling and risk getting hurt. Even if you take that risk and get hurt, you'll be happy you did in the end when the joyful events of life occur, because they will make all of the hurt worth it.