Care About What You Create
Written By Jeyes Tan Edited by Xaviera
The Invisible Weight of Care
I’ve been thinking about value in our world. More specifically, the value of caring about what one creates. Caring is a strange thing; it is invisible to the eye and immeasurable to the market, yet it changes everything. When you look closely at anything that lasts, whether it is a bridge, a poem, or a cup, you begin to notice the fingerprints of someone who refused to compromise. Slowly, you realise that this kind of work underpins the systems we rely on and enriches the moments we live for. It makes the world functional, yet feels alive.
If you pay attention, you start to see that care lives in the everyday. It appears in the engineer who stays a little longer at the bench because a measurement feels suspicious even if it ‘should’ be correct. It appears in the policy writer reading her draft aloud for the tenth time, listening for the one phrase that might weaken public trust. It appears that the shop owner who arranges the produce with a sense of rhythm, not because it will increase profit, but because it feels respectful. It appears in the coder who refactors a section of logic no one else will ever see, simply because he knows the future maintainer deserves better. These are not glamorous moments. No one is clapping for them, and most people will never notice. Yet the difference is there, living quietly.
Care may begin in small moments, but it never stays small. It expands outward, creating a kind of order that is felt more than seen. Care is what makes an experience human and underpins the creative process behind a successful product. On a personal level, mutual care and support are the fundamentals of connecting with family and friends. On a professional level, it becomes the difference between work that merely functions and work that invites trust. It gives shape to systems that would otherwise collapse under haste or indifference. This is how care moves from the personal to the structural.
How Care Becomes Economic Value
Upon noticing the crucial role of care in day-to-day life, you begin to see the larger world differently. You begin to realise that many of the things we rely on exist only because someone cared enough to shape them with intention. A well-designed public transport system depends on planners who think about how a tired commuter will feel at the end of a long day. Safe buildings depend on engineers who refuse to overlook a hairline crack. A piece of clothing becomes valuable because a designer obsesses over its drape and durability. For example, think of a brand like Momotaro Jeans in Okayama, where craftsmen still dye cotton by hand and weave denim slowly on old shuttle looms so that each pair develops its own character over years of wear. Thoughtful objects shaped with this kind of
intention pass through supply chains, support makers, strengthen retail communities, and give a country its cultural presence in the world.
As care moves through these industries, it creates value while reducing waste, building trust, and allowing innovation to take root. When people appreciate the care and effort behind a creation, they pay not only for the item itself, but for the meaning and trust that come with it. In this way, care does not just improve the quality of individual creations. It strengthens the economic pulse of a country by generating work that people value, share, and return to. Care creates the kind of momentum that sustains crucial industries in an economy.
Disenchantment and the Loss of Perception
There is, however, a quiet condition that determines whether care can create value at all, and it sits in the space between the maker and the receiver. Care only matters when it is recognised. Sociologist Max Weber described modern life as increasingly disenchanted, organised around efficiency, calculation, and optimisation, where meaning is slowly
stripped away because it cannot be measured. In such a world, producers are pressured to rationalise care out of their work, while consumers, shaped by the same forces, begin to lose the ability to perceive it even when it remains. Over time, consumption becomes faster and more transactional. Objects arrive without stories, work arrives without visible hands, and clothing is treated as interchangeable rather than lived with. We learn to compare prices instead of quality, speed instead of intention, and convenience instead of care. This erosion is gradual and largely invisible, but its effects are profound. When perception dulls, willingness to value follows. Care does not fail because it lacks worth, but because the relationship that once allowed it to circulate as meaning and value has weakened. In a disenchanted economy, care struggles not because people no longer care, but because fewer people know how to recognise it.
You can already see this logic at work in places where interaction has been fully optimised. Consider customer service that responds instantly but never really listens. Messages are fluent, polite, and efficient, yet strangely empty. Problems are resolved according to scripts rather than understanding. No one pauses to ask what the situation actually feels like on the other side. The system functions, but the relationship is gone. This is not a failure of technology, but a consequence of removing the space where care once lived. When responsiveness replaces attentiveness, and optimisation replaces judgment, the human choice to care disappears from the process altogether. What remains is speed without reassurance and resolution without trust. It is here that disenchantment begins to feel complete, because neither the maker nor the receiver is asked to be fully present anymore.
What we are seeing now with artificial intelligence feels like the further unfolding of this same logic. In many areas, human intention is no longer just marginalised but removed entirely. Designs are generated, text is written, interfaces are optimised, and systems are refined without a moment where a person chooses quality over efficiency or meaning over
speed. The result is work that functions but feels strangely hollow, because there was no one there to care in the first place. Product descriptions read smoothly but say nothing. Customer service responds instantly but listens to no one. Content appears everywhere yet feels interchangeable, as though it could belong to anywhere and no one. In this environment, care becomes difficult not only to reward but even to locate. At the same time, a paradox emerges. As human intention disappears from what we consume, we find ourselves craving it more. Handwritten notes feel precious. Thoughtful service feels rare. Objects made slowly feel grounding. Yet the very systems that surround us also dull our ability to tell the difference. Algorithms train us to scroll, compare, and optimise, not to linger or discern. This creates a quiet spiral. Less care in production leads to less ability to perceive care, which leads to less reward for care, encouraging even greater reliance on optimisation. In this sense, artificial intelligence is not the cause of the problem, but its most honest expression. It executes the logic of an economy that no longer rewards care with perfect consistency. Where intention is invisible, and meaning cannot be priced, optimisation becomes the only rational response. AI simply carries this logic to its natural conclusion, producing work that is efficient, scalable, and technically competent, yet emptied of the human choice to care.
When care can no longer be recognised, it can no longer be sustained. Markets reward what is visible, measurable, and quickly understood. As consumers lose the ability to perceive intention, depth, or craftsmanship, their willingness to pay for it fades. Over time, this reshapes production itself. Producers respond rationally, not maliciously, by stripping away what no longer registers. Care becomes an unnecessary cost, replaced by speed, scale, and optimisation. What begins as a change in perception quietly becomes a change in creation. This is how an economy teaches its makers what is worth making.
The effects of this logic become visible at scale. Products begin to feel thin, systems lose clarity, and art and clothing slip into interchangeability rather than expression. Companies falter when they forget why their work mattered in the first place. Apple is a familiar example. When Steve Jobs was pushed out, the company shifted its focus away from careful product thinking toward expansion and efficiency, and within a few short years it was on the brink of collapse. The economy still moved, but the movement felt hollow. Without care, value thins, trust weakens, and life fills with things that function on the surface yet leave us untouched beneath it.
Why Caring Still Matters
This is why choosing to care matters, even before the work itself improves. Once you see what happens when care is missing, you begin to understand how transformative it can be when care is present. The moment you decide that something deserves your full attention, even if no one else will ever notice, you start to relate to the world differently. You slow down enough to see once invisible details. You begin to feel the weight of your own choices. You sense a quiet pride in doing something well for its own sake. Care trains you to stay with a moment longer than convenience requires, and in doing so, it teaches you
who you are becoming. It shows you that meaning is not found in grand gestures, but in the small acts where you give yourself entirely to the task in front of you.
This habit does not stay confined to the moments of creation. It begins to seep into the rest of your life. Work trains the ears, and suddenly, conversations sound different because active listening has become second nature. Hours spent noticing small details in your craft make it easier to find beauty in ordinary places. You take responsibility for the things you touch because you have learnt that care has consequences, both for systems and for the soul. Gradually, caring shifts from a method into a posture. Time gains depth. Attention sharpens. The heart opens in ways that surprise you. Life starts to feel more coherent, as though its pieces finally belong to one another. With time, the act of caring reveals itself as a quiet conviction, a belief that the world is shaped not only by what we create, but by the spirit we bring to the creating. Once that belief settles in you, it becomes hard to return to a life lived on the surface.
When you look again at the things that last, you start to see them not just as objects or systems, but as traces of the people who shaped them. Each careful decision leaves a kind of fingerprint, a small mark of intention pressed into the world. These marks outlive the maker and are part of the experience of others. And then you realise that you are leaving fingerprints too. Every time you choose to care, you place a small piece of yourself into something that will move beyond you. It may be a gesture, a sentence, a design, a project, or a quiet act of responsibility that no one sees. Yet it matters. Care adds up.