Dark Akademia Klub VII: When Caring Hurts

About Dark Akademia Klub

A series of salons that bring together individuals who are curious, reflective, and willing to engage, not as experts, but as participants in a shared inquiry. Topics span across culture, politics, identity, relationships, and power, offering a space to dissect ideas, challenge assumptions, and think out loud with others. It is less about arriving at answers and more about learning how to stay with complexity, even when it’s uncomfortable.

About Chapter VII

Care is one of the most familiar words we know, yet perhaps one of the least understood.

We speak about caring for ourselves, our families, our communities, and the world. We long for belonging, intimacy, friendship, and love. Yet despite becoming increasingly fluent in the language of care, many of us also feel more isolated than ever. 

Today, relationships fracture more easily. Communities struggle to sustain themselves. And loneliness has become… epidemic.

What if what we have lost is not our desire to care, but our imagination of what care actually is?

We often imagine care as kindness, affection, empathy… as something emotional. But the relationships that have shaped us most were never built on feeling alone. They were built through countless mundane acts of labour: remembering, noticing, waiting, forgiving, listening, cooking, teaching, maintaining, showing up, or even staying. Care has always been less about intensity than endurance.

Yet, our understanding of relationships has begun to resemble the marketplace. We speak of emotional investment, emotional returns, emotional labour, boundaries, value, compatibility, whether someone deserves our time, whether a relationship is "worth it," and whether we need to leave something that doesn’t “serve us.” None of these ideas are necessarily wrong. But together they reveal something deeper: we have become increasingly accustomed to understanding relationships through the language of exchange.

When care becomes transactional, disappointment is reduced into mere debt. One person leaves believing they have asked for too much. The other leaves believing they will never be enough. We begin measuring love with balance sheets rather than capacities. We ask whether someone has met our needs before asking what resources they had left to give.

Perhaps this is why community feels increasingly difficult to sustain. Communities were never places where everyone arrived with equal capacity. They existed precisely because our capacities were different. We carried one another when someone could not carry themselves. 

In that way, what if care was never about equal contribution? What if it was about enlarging one another's ability to give? What if belonging is not simply being accepted, but about participating in one another's becoming?

What if the question has never been whether love is difficult, but whether we still believe some things are worth labouring for?

Tonight is not about arriving at better answers.

It is about noticing how deeply the language of exchange has colonised our imagination and asking whether another way of relating is still possible.