Life & Wisdom Quote by Doug Coupland

Coupland’s line lands like a cold diagnosis of a very modern illness: emotional inflation. The cruelty here isn’t overt malice; it’s the casual, strategic overpromising of intimacy. “Pretend” signals performance, not confusion. You know the gap between what you feel and what you’re projecting, and you choose the projection anyway. That’s what makes it cruel: it turns another person’s hope into a resource you can borrow against.

The phrase “more than you really do” is doing the heavy lifting. It concedes that some care might be real, just not proportional to the signals being sent. That’s the recognizable terrain of late-20th/early-21st-century relationships Coupland has chronicled so well: people fluent in the aesthetics of connection (texts, check-ins, affectionate talk) but wary of the obligations that actual commitment creates. The subtext is about power. Overstated care gives you the perks of closeness - attention, loyalty, emotional labor, the comfort of being wanted - without paying the cost of responsibility or consistency.

Contextually, Coupland writes out of an era shaped by irony, branding, and self-curation, where sincerity is both craved and suspect. Pretending to care is a kind of soft gaslighting: it encourages someone to build a life around signals that won’t be honored. The brilliance is its simplicity: he reframes a common “niceness” as harm, exposing how deception can hide inside warmth.