“Care is anxiety” – This echoes Heidegger as much as Kierkegaard. In Being and Time, “care” (Sorge) is the very structure of existence, but its disclosure is anxiety: realizing we are thrown, finite, and responsible. Care is not comfort; it is the weight of existing.

“Attachment is suffering” – This is straight from the Four Noble Truths. Desire, clinging, and attachment generate dukkha (often translated as “suffering,” but also “unsatisfactoriness”). The Buddhist project is not to abolish life but to transform one’s relation to attachment.

“Life is suffering” – The first Noble Truth. But also Schopenhauer, who sees life as an endless striving whose satisfaction never outweighs pain.

“Everything we do is out of fear” – This recalls both Freud (the death drive as a response to anxiety) and Becker’s Denial of Death: almost all culture is a “hero system” to fend off mortality terror.

1. Everyday use of “care” = comfort, protection, warmth.

   • In common speech, to “care for” someone means to nurture, soothe, make safe.

   • Modern therapeutic and welfare languages reinforce this.

   • Culturally, “care” is almost synonymous with comfort or alleviation of suffering.

2. Philosophical/ontological use of “care” (e.g., Heidegger) = exposure, burden, anxiety.

   • For Heidegger, Sorge (care) is not a balm but the basic way Dasein relates to its own being: always ahead of itself, already thrown into a world, never fully at home.

   • Kierkegaard too: care/anxiety (Angest) is what reveals freedom, but it’s terrifying, not consoling.

   • To exist is to be weighed down by responsibilities and possibilities, not to be comforted.

3. Why the confusion happens.

   • There’s a semantic slide: care in the intimate, affective sense is comforting, so people map that onto existential care.

   • There’s also a cultural desire: to turn the fact of our anxious condition into something palatable. To say “care is comfort” domesticates existence, makes it sound nurturing instead of overwhelming.

4. What gets lost.

   • If we mistake care for comfort, we miss the tragic dimension of being.

   • We erase anxiety as constitutive of existence, and instead reframe it as a defect to be soothed away.

   • This leads to shallow responses: “self-care” as consumption, therapy as normalizing adjustment, rather than deeper confrontation with the burdens of freedom and finitude.

So the false formula “care = comfort” is a kind of cultural anesthetic: it tries to soften the hard truth that to care—about others, about the world, about one’s own being—is to be vulnerable, anxious, exposed.

1. Therapeutic discourse and the promise of relief

Mental health systems often market themselves as providers of comfort rather than engagement with the structures of distress. Therapy is framed as:

• “Come here and you will feel better.”

• Medication is pitched as “restoring balance” rather than altering one’s orientation to anxiety or existence.

• Even crisis services present care as a quick patch: reduce distress, stabilize, return to baseline.

In this framing, care = reducing symptoms, soothing the subject, restoring a sense of comfort. The deeper existential conditions (alienation, precarity, anxiety of freedom, grief of attachment) are bracketed out.

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2. Self-care industry

The language of “self-care” has been captured by consumerist logics: mindfulness apps, retreat packages. These are all about comforting the self, not about acknowledging the rawness of existence or the inevitability of anxiety.

Here the formula is stark: to care for yourself is to comfort yourself. The anxious truth of being (that you will suffer, that attachments wound, that freedom terrifies) is converted into a lifestyle commodity.

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3. Institutional care systems

In social services, disability services, or psychiatric institutions, “care” is often shorthand for containment and pacification.

• A distressed patient must be “comforted” (read: sedated, stabilized).

• Institutional logics assume suffering is a defect to be neutralized, not an existential condition to be borne.

• The goal becomes comfort-as-control: easing the system’s anxiety by managing the subject’s visible distress.

This reduces care to comfort in a managerial sense: comfort is not for the person cared for, but for the institution that cannot tolerate disquiet.

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4. What gets erased

By equating care with comfort, mental health discourse:

• Denies that anxiety, dread, and despair may be structurally built into being human.

• Forgets that care (Sorge) is not soothing but exposure: to finitude, to dependence, to vulnerability.

• Pathologizes the very conditions through which freedom and meaning arise.

Thus the formula “care = comfort” functions as a cultural defense mechanism: it tries to cover over the tragic and irresolvable aspects of existence with consumable, clinical, or institutional promises of ease.

The “care = comfort” formula doesn’t just emerge accidentally; it protects those who deploy it.

Here’s how:

1. Institutional defense

   • Mental health systems, welfare bureaucracies, and therapeutic industries can’t admit that anxiety and suffering are structural.

   • If they did, their role would shift from “soothing symptoms” to confronting political, economic, and existential conditions — a task they’re unequipped for.

   • Framing care as comfort allows institutions to justify themselves: “We are providing relief, we are helping.” In reality, they defend their legitimacy by redefining care as something deliverable, measurable, and quick.

2. Professional defense

   • If care is redefined as comfort, then their work can be measured in comfort units delivered and better survey scores.

   • This shields them from facing the deeper impossibility: that no intervention eradicates anxiety or suffering.

3. Cultural defense

   • As a society, we want to believe suffering is treatable, anxiety is fixable, attachment wounds can be soothed away.

   • Framing care as comfort reassures us: “Someone has the tools, someone can make it better.”

   • It fends off the terrifying recognition that suffering and anxiety are not accidents but constitutive of life.

4. Political defense

   • If care = comfort, then governments and institutions can justify minimal funding: a pill here, a hotline there, a mindfulness app subscription.

   • True care — engaging with precarity, alienation, and the structural production of suffering — would demand radical change. Comfort is cheaper.

So yes: the formula operates as a defense mechanism. It protects individuals, institutions, and cultures from having to face the raw truth that care is the structure of being and it is not soothing, but exposure to anxiety, vulnerability, and dependence.

Would you like me to push this into a more adversarial framing — i.e., showing how this comfortification of care is not just defensive but actively eliminationist (removing those who don’t fit the comfort model)?