Have you ever noticed that sometimes when you are less about something, you do better at it? Have you noticed that it's often the person who is the least invested in the success of something that actually ends up achieving it? Have you came across the feeling that sometimes when you stop being overly concerned about things, everything seems to fall in place? What's with that?
Not worrying too much works in reverse. It's much more likely that you have noticed it at some point in your life. Pursuing the positive is a negative experience. And paradoxically, the accpetance of one's negative experience is itself a positive experience. It's what the philosopher Alan Watts refered to as "the backward law".
You will never be happy is you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you're looking for the meaning of life. - Albert Camus -
What's wrong with us then?
Our culture today is obsessively focused on unrealistically positive expectations. Be happier. Be healthier. Be smarter, faster, richer, more popular, more productive. Be perfect and amazing. Wake up every morning and fly your helicopter to your wonderfully fulfilling job, where you spend your days doing incredibly meaningful work that's likely to save the planet one day.
But when we stop and really think about it, conventional life advice and all positive and happy self-help stuff we hear all the time, is actually fixating on what we lack. It lasers in on what we perceive our personal shortcomings and failures to already be, and then emphasizes them for us.
We learn about the best ways to make money because we feel we don't have enough money already. We stand in the front of a mirror and repeat affirmations saying that we are beautiful because we dell as though we are not beautiful already. The fixation on the positive - on what's better, what's superior - only serves to remind us consistently of what we are not, of what we lack, of what we should have been but failed to be.
After all, no truly happy person feels the need to stand in front of a mirror and recite that they're happy. They just are! - Mark Manson -
We have been brought up in a such way as though we are always entitled to be perfect, happy, smart and rich. That feeling sad and anxious means that there's something wrong with us. That experiencing failures and defeats implies that somehow we are not up to facing challenges and not eligible to live a charming life.
We are so worried about doing the right thing all the time that we become worried about how we are worrying. Or feel guilty for every mistake we make that we begin to feel guilty about how guilty we are feeling. Or we get sad and alone so often that It makes us feel even more sad and alone just thinking about it. This is what Mark Manson have called The Feedback Loop from Hell.
This is why not caring is the key
This is what is going to save the world. And it's going to save it by accepting that the world is totally screwed and that's all right, because it's always been that way, and always will be. We have to admit that pain, failures, fears, and anxieties are inextricable threads if the fabric of life.
Not caring that you feel bad, you short-circuit the Feedback Loop from Hell; you say to yourself, "I feel bad, but who cares?" And then, as if sprinkled by magic, you stop hating yourself for feeling so bad.
Stress-related health issues, anxiety disorders, and cases of depression have skyrocketed over the past few decades ... Our crisis is no longer material; it's existential, it's spiritual. - Mark Manson -
Being open with your insecurities paradoxically makes you more confident and charismatic around others. Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experiences. Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires. To try to avoid pain is to give too much care about pain, to be overly concerned about it. In contrasts, if you able to no care about the pain, you become unstoppable.
Not giving too much care doesn't mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different
Let's be clear about something: there's absolutely nothing admirable or confident about indifference. In fact, indifferent people are afraid of the world and the repercussions of their own choices. That's why they don't make any meaningful choices. They tend to hide a gray pit, perpetually distracting themselves from this unfortunate thing demanding their time and energy called life.
Here's a sneaky truth about life. There's no such thing as not caring at all. We must care about something. The question is: what do we care about? Or rather, what should we care about? And how can we not care about what ultimately does not matter?
The art behind not caring about things is essentially learning how to focus and prioritize our thoughts effectively. It means to acquire the ability to bravely confront failure in the face, to become the kind of people who just laugh and then do what they believ in anyway. Because they know it's right. The point is not to get away from the negative. The point id to find the negative you enjoy dealing with.
To not care about adversity, you must first find something more important than adversity
When person have no problems, the mind automatically finds a way to invent some. It then follows that finding something important and meaningful in your life is perhaps the most productive use of your time and energy. Because if we don't find that meaningful thing, our attention will be driven to meaningless and frivolous things.
The takeaway lesson?
Today we are facing a psychological epidemic, one in which people no longer realize it's okay for things to suck sometimes. Because when we believe the other way around, then we unconsciously start blaming ourselves. We start to feel as though something is inherently wrong with us.
There's a practical enlightenment in this as becoming comfortable with the idea that some suffering is always inevitable, that no matter what we do, life is comprised of failures, loss, regrets, and even death. Because once you become comfortable with all the negative outcome of plain life process, you become invincible in a sort of low-spiritual way. Because greatness is merely an illusion in our minds, a made-up destination that we obligate ourselves to pursue, our own psychological Atlantis.
Mostly inspired from "The subtle art of not giving a f***", by Mark Manson.
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