How Do I Stop Caring?
The greatest hurdle to achieving happiness is training our minds to stop caring about what other people think.
Consider how often you consider how people will consider the things you say and do.
Yeah, we’re all caught inside our heads doing a lot of considering every day.
This is why young children and dogs bring us such joy. They do things without caring. Children explore, say things and react with unharnessed enthusiasm as they are just being and doing. And dogs never criticize. When you come home, they are 100 percent love, tail wagging and eyes bright.
At some point in our lives we start to transition from carefree to caring, and we find ourselves caught in an endless loop of trying to meet expectations which are often undefined and ever-changing. Are we wearing the right clothes? Using the right words? Driving the right car? Making enough money? Have a big enough house? Have the right schooling? Appear to others smart enough, strong enough, attractive enough and talented enough?
These small threads of concern aggregate to become binds on our thoughts and actions. “What will people think if I say or do this?” And we know we shouldn’t care but we do care, and a small voice inside our head keeps asking all the time, “How do I stop caring?”
We do have to care about how the things we say and do affect others. The attitude, “Well, I just am who I am and people have to deal with it” is fine as long as one’s behavior does not hurt other people. “Keeping it real” does not mean bluntly calling out someone or something that is not to our liking and hurting their feelings. One can “keep it real” and be kind.
Despite reaching a point in my own life where I am comfortable with “me” and believing I am a generally happy person, a part of my brain still leeches into that happiness from time to time and asks, “What will they think?” For example, I will proofread this article several times before publishing it so people don’t discover tpyos and think I am a careless writer.
How did I reach a place where I am more comfortable and happy than not? I regret to share with any younger people reading this that I have no method or hack to make this easy. The two most powerful components of a path to happiness are time and perspective.
Over time the stuff that doesn’t matter begins to fall away. The people that don’t matter, especially those who rob you of your self-confidence and sense of self-worth, either drift out of our lives, or we push them out. (And if you have someone in your life who brings more negative energy than love, you should push them out. Life’s too short to accommodate energy vampires.)
Gradually, our perspective comes into greater focus about what matters and what does not and we find our emotional foundations. These are the people that matter. Look at a building that is still standing centuries after it was built. Why is it still standing? A rock-solid foundation. The same is true for us. What keeps us standing and moving forward are the people who act as foundations in our lives, the relationships that nourish us, keep us strong and help us weather whatever life wants to throw at us. Anchor on those foundations.
Learning to not care is a choice. We have to decide we are not going to worry about being judged because those who judge have no legitimacy to declare what is right or wrong. Sure, we have certain behavioral “norms” as a society so everyone can strive to live in peace. But life has no user manual. We make it up every day with whatever is put in front of us.
If we strive to do our best, treat others with kindness and try to leave everywhere we’ve been a little better than it was, we should take pride that we have done all we can expect of ourselves. And all we should care about is what we expect of ourselves. In that is happiness.
(Photo by Senjuti Kundu)