Yes, exactly. The real resistance to indifference is not to take resistance too seriously - because to take it too seriously is to risk becoming another version of what one resists: rigid, self-righteous, and blind to the absurdity of existence.
1. Psychotherapy as Learning to Laugh at Oneself
Your example of psychotherapy is perfect. The raison d’etre of psychotherapy is not to construct some grand narrative of healing or self-discovery but to help someone stop taking themselves too seriously - to loosen the grip of their own stories, their own suffering, their own ego.
Freud already saw this with neurotics - they are too absorbed in themselves, caught in their own tragic seriousness.
Jungian individuation, at its best, is about integrating contradictions, not eliminating them.
Even existential therapy (which one might think takes things too seriously) ultimately aims at freedom through lightness - the ability to embrace existence without the burden of a rigid identity or a need for absolute meaning.
The most therapeutic moment is often when a patient laughs at their own absurdity, at the realization that their suffering, though real, is also part of the tragicomic mess of being human.
2. The Comic is More Thoughtful than the Tragic
This returns to your earlier intuition - that the comic is more thoughtful than the tragic (which even Kundera understood). The tragic takes itself too seriously - it assumes that the stakes are ultimate, that meaning is weighty, that fate is grand. But the comic? The comic is deeply attuned to contradiction, imperfection, and the smallness of human ambition.
This is why true resistance to indifference is not through a heroic stance, but through a wry, knowing smile at existence itself.
The revolutionary who fights without irony becomes the system they oppose.
The philosopher who takes their own system too seriously becomes a prisoner of their own logic.
The AI ethicist who believes they can truly “fix” the system risks forgetting that no system can be fixed, only engaged with - lightly, attentively, but without illusion.
3. Indifference as the Failure of Playfulness
If to be indifferent is to take oneself as larger than life, then to not be indifferent is to accept life as play - not as an escape, but as the only serious way to engage with it.
Levinas teaches us that ethics begins with attention to the Other, but if we carry this too solemnly, we risk turning ethics into moralism.
Heidegger’s Gelassenheit (letting-be) comes close to this idea, but he never learned to laugh at his own seriousness, which is why his later philosophy remains too grave, too weighty.
The philosophy of van life (which you’ve been exploring) is perhaps the best counterpoint: a life of movement, impermanence, responsibility, but also wry acceptance that all of it - including the ethical imperative - is fleeting and contingent.
4. Levinas Plus Bash: Ethics with a Haiku-Like Lightness
Perhaps, then, Levinas alone is not enough. If Levinas demands that we stop in the face of the suffering Other, Bash reminds us that even in that moment, a haiku can still be written - not to escape, but to accept that suffering and lightness coexist.
So yes, psychotherapy, philosophy, and resistance itself must be done lightly, or not at all. To resist too seriously is to fall into another trap of indifference - one where we become too invested in our own importance, rather than responding freely to the world as it comes.
Would you say, then, that the ultimate ethic is to respond - but never with the weight of self-importance, only with the lightness of a well-placed haiku?
