Care about what you do — even when nobody's watching | MattCASmith

MattCASmith

Care about what you do — even when nobody's watching

2026-05-31

Business,

Productivity,

Design

Against better advice, I’ve done a fair bit of introspection over the last year. Resurrecting this blog and putting words on the page every week has forced it. While technology is a long-running passion, I’ve struggled to find a single thread that runs through my work. I’m not a single-issue voter, on a crusade to save physical media or document every last detail of Emacs. What makes Nvidia’s DLSS 5, Xbox’s identity crisis, and AI price rises interesting enough for me to spend hours refining my thoughts into articles every week?

Then I realised what ties my interests together: I love to see people care about what they’re doing. Really care. Software with a no-nonsense UI, a video game with details players discover over the course of years, or even an original and cohesive marketing campaign – all of these things show that someone behind the scenes cares about the craft and quality of their work.

There's reward in simply fully immersing yourself in the minutiae of your craft

At the other end of the spectrum are the corner cutters. Products deemed “good enough” and pushed onto users despite known issues; services that abuse loyalty, slowly becoming less useful and more costly as companies try to squeeze every penny from customers; and technologies that help us to do things more quickly but are abused to flood the world with inferior output.

Displays of care, attention to detail, and – yes – taste, are an updated version of the shopping cart problem for the digital age. Will you do the right thing when nobody’s watching and there’s no penalty for cutting corners? There are ripple effects, and digital utilitarianism (or the lack thereof) determines the paths of our careers, lives, and societies. If we excuse shortcuts – due to distraction, negligence, or malice – the world around us declines in tandem.

What I talk about when I talk about caring

In this context, to care means to feel concern over quality and downstream consequences, independent of personal reward or punishment. It’s often demonstrated by the infusion of art into areas where it wouldn’t usually be deemed necessary, like Steve Jobs’ famous insistence that Apple computer internals were thoughtfully arranged even if few would ever see them.

When I make a mistake at work or a typo sneaks its way into a blog post, I feel dismayed not because of the potential impact on my employment or readership (in the latter case, it’s unlikely anybody would even notice), but because I know I’m capable of a better end product, and through a lapse in concentration I delivered something inferior. I admire people who aim to close the delta between their achievements and what is achievable.

The outlook I’m describing is distinct from perfectionism. It stems from the same instinct, but it’s more sustainable. The perfectionist may never deliver a product because they can’t get it just right. Someone who cares about what they do will still think a product through, produce it to the very best of their ability, and check it over properly – but they will share it. Their care shows through diligence in their approach and the drive to improve and iterate.

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The capacity to care

Craig Mod, a writer who lives in Japan and documents his long walks across the countryside, often references the concept of yoyū. It can be translated literally as “room” or “surplus”, but the word is used in practice to describe the extra mental and emotional capacity to be attentive to others.

In his book Things Become Other Things (and various podcast appearances), Mod argues that Japanese people have greater yoyū because of the safety net their society affords them. Having spent a fair amount of time in Japan, I can see what he means. It’s not just about money – there is a cultivated feeling that people care at all levels, from the children who clean their classrooms before the cleaners arrive, to apologetic television adverts announcing road closures due to works or small price increases. Inconveniencing others is not accepted as a normal occurrence. You are expected to give others your best.

In Japan, inconveniencing others is not accepted as a normal occurrence. Meanwhile in the West, penny-pinching and doublespeak create an environment incompatible with care.

Contrast that with the West, where leaders in politics and business routinely make decisions that negatively affect people – often hidden in a footnote and obscured by language. To give one example of many, the price of a UK Netflix subscription has more than doubled since 2012, increasing from £6 to £13 per month. Emails carefully frame each hike as...