Just read a great post on the Happiness Project (great blog! You should read!) about how one of the secrets of happiness is not caring. The source of the quote is G. Gordon Liddy, which is unfortunate, but doesn’t detract from the general wisdom that a lot of our misery comes from caring about the wrong things. For me, that is often about caring about what I think other people will think.
Do you really care what other people think about you? To some degree, we all do. But to some extent, obsessing about what other people think distracts us from the more important issue, which is what do I think? What matters to me? And then doing or changing something because it matters to me, not to some “other people.”
I find most of the time those “other people,” those people who I imagine are looking at me or commenting on me, are really the sh*tty committee that lives in my head. You know them, they probably are in your head, too. They are the ones who say that you look crappy in that shirt, and your pants are too tight, and why do you always do that, and why did you SAY that, and blah blah blah.
Sometimes, though, the sh*tty committee needs reinforcement. So they start enlisting poor unsuspecting Other People to back them up, to agree that to any objective (of course!) Other Person, who you are or what you are doing is Bad.
So. I listen to the little voice. Then I decide whether or not I do, in fact, care. If I should care. If it’s something I can do something about. Or want to do something about.
If I don’t care, or if I do but not enough to do something about it, then it goes in the Don’t Care category. When that little voice peeps up again, I tell it again (gently, because it does mean well) that I don’t care, and it’s time to let it go.
So what won’t you care about today?
