Stopped Caring



A character, having faced an indifferent world for so long, finally gives up all pretense of trying. He does the bare minimum to try to get his job done and makes no effort of initiative elsewhere. He knows that whatever he tries isn't going to work, so it's just easier to be jaded and cynical, and right then to be constantly disappointed by plans that never work.

Depressing as that sounds, this trope is almost always played for comedy. This is because the trope is a popular part of Deadpan Snarker mentality. One of the benefits of not caring is that there's nothing stopping you from making cynical, ironic and humorous quips about the world around you. Granted, said character won't be much fun to be around since he makes these jokes at the expense of nearly everyone else, but again, he doesn't care, and it's not like anyone's going to have the guts to actually do something about it since his irritation doesn't go past his passive-aggressive sarcasm.

This should not be confused with a related concept, Professional Slacker, which is when a character makes an aggressive effort to do as little work as possible.

The meta-counterpart of They Just Didn't Care. When used seriously, the character has probably crossed the Despair Event Horizon. Compare Giving Up on Logic.

Comic Books

 * Possibly the "rich hottie" in Local #8. He's rich, gorgeous, and considerate, but Megan ends up deciding it "just isn't right" and leaves his bed giving the It's Not You, It's Me line, to which he replies "it never is". Megan sees this as proving that he's secretly a jerk, but alternatively, the poor guy has been through this routine so many times that he's completely indifferent to what she thinks of him now since he knows she's not coming back. It's the easiest explanation for why.

Literature

 * Warrior Cats: Bluestar does this in the later part of the first series, convinced that her Clan is full of traitors and that StarClan is at war with her Clan.

Newspaper Comics

 * In Doonesbury, this is what's happened to Walden's President King. Frustrated with the (ultimately successful) attempts of students to segregate themselves in the early 1990s, he's since become completely indifferent to his job, allowing Walden to languish into a low-tier party school where students don't even make a pretense of planning for their futures. At one memorable commencement address, he even stated this outright to the students, asking who would ditch his degree right now if he could become a writer for Family Guy. All of the students promptly raised their hands, except for one who was scared of the Killer Bees that live in California.

Video Games

 * In Dwarf Fortress the Dwarves who experience tragedy gradually become accustomed to it. Usually it happens via being exposed to violence and death, though personal injuries, miscarriages and acquaintances left unburied also counts. The status screen shows this as "is getting used to tragedy", then "is a hardened individual", and in the end "doesn't really care about anything anymore". This progressively reduces happiness penalties, especially from tragedies, but also other morale effects - they tend to retain mood from "content" to "happy" even when everyone else is ecstatic or in a tantrum spiral, since it takes a lot to really move these dwarves either way (multiple and very personal events can do it, though).

Web Comics

 * In Sinfest, Fuschia's in love. It does not encourage her to do well in the soul buying business.

Western Animation

 * The Simpsons has a couple of examples:
 * Reverend Lovejoy started out as an eager young minster willing to help his parishioners, but was worn down by Ned Flanders' incessant griping. "Finally, I just stopped caring. Fortunately, by that time it was the 1980s and no one noticed."
 * Mrs. Krabappel was a dedicated teacher until she met up with Bart.
 * Bart Simpson was really enthusiastic about school until he met up with the worst kindergarten teacher.
 * Invader Zim: A problem the writers had with Dib near the end of the show's run was that he was becoming this trope, thus ruining the central conflict of the premise. This is most evident in Zim Eats Waffles wherein after having been humiliated in front of his teammates at the Swollen Eyeball and having his room destroyed by robots, Dib screams only briefly, then simply mumbles "whatever...", and goes to bed.

Real Life

 * When the Visigoth king Alaric I sacked Rome for the third time in August 410, the citizenry of the severely weakened and demoralized city offered no real resistance. (Historians disagree on whether the famous opening of the Salarian Gate by Roman slaves, to let in Alaric's army, was the city's ultimate expression of this trope, or whether it was a plot in which Visigoth soldiers infiltrated Rome by going undercover as slaves.)