"Care is a state in which something does matter; it is the source of human tenderness"
About this Quote
Care, for Rollo May, isn’t soft focus sentiment. It’s a psychological stance: the moment you admit something can wound you, you’ve granted it reality. In calling care “a state in which something does matter,” May frames tenderness not as personality or virtue, but as attention under risk. You can’t be tender from a distance. You have to be implicated.
The line carries the existentialist mood that runs through May’s work: modern life trains us to anesthetize ourselves, to treat meaning as optional and attachment as inefficient. “Care” becomes a refusal of that numbness. It’s also a subtle rebuke to the era’s rising faith in technique - therapy as fix, emotion as symptom to manage. May insists that tenderness doesn’t originate in cleverness or self-control; it’s born from significance. When something matters, you become permeable, and that permeability shows up as gentleness, patience, protectiveness.
The subtext is that cruelty is often just the absence of care, not the presence of hatred. Indifference is the real antagonist. If tenderness is “sourced” in care, then a culture that rewards detachment - professionalized distance, irony as armor, productivity as identity - will predictably run low on tenderness.
Contextually, May is writing in a postwar, increasingly bureaucratic America where anxiety and alienation feel structural, not merely personal. His intent is diagnostic and moral at once: recover care, and you recover a humane texture of life. Lose it, and you don’t just lose warmth - you lose the capacity to treat anything as worth protecting.
The line carries the existentialist mood that runs through May’s work: modern life trains us to anesthetize ourselves, to treat meaning as optional and attachment as inefficient. “Care” becomes a refusal of that numbness. It’s also a subtle rebuke to the era’s rising faith in technique - therapy as fix, emotion as symptom to manage. May insists that tenderness doesn’t originate in cleverness or self-control; it’s born from significance. When something matters, you become permeable, and that permeability shows up as gentleness, patience, protectiveness.
The subtext is that cruelty is often just the absence of care, not the presence of hatred. Indifference is the real antagonist. If tenderness is “sourced” in care, then a culture that rewards detachment - professionalized distance, irony as armor, productivity as identity - will predictably run low on tenderness.
Contextually, May is writing in a postwar, increasingly bureaucratic America where anxiety and alienation feel structural, not merely personal. His intent is diagnostic and moral at once: recover care, and you recover a humane texture of life. Lose it, and you don’t just lose warmth - you lose the capacity to treat anything as worth protecting.
Quote Details
| Topic | Kindness |
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