The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F_ck

Just as we look back in horror at the lives of people five
hundred years ago, I imagine people five hundred years
from now will laugh at us and our certainties today. They will
laugh at how we let our money and our jobs define our lives.
They will laugh at how we were afraid to show appreciation
for those who matter to us most, yet heaped praise on
public figures who didn’t deserve anything. They will laugh
at our rituals and superstitions, our worries and our wars;
they will gawk at our cruelty. They will study our art and
argue over our history. They will understand truths about us
of which none of us are yet aware.
And they, too, will be wrong. Just less wrong than we
were.
Architects of Our Own Beliefs
Try this. Take a random person and put them in a room with
some buttons to push. Then tell them that if they do
something specific—some undefined something that they
have to figure out—a light will flash on indicating that
they’ve won a point. Then tell them to see how many points
they can earn within a thirty-minute period.
When psychologists have done this, what happens is
what you might expect. People sit down and start mashing
buttons at random until eventually the light comes on to tell
them they got a point. Logically, they then try repeating
whatever they were doing to get more points. Except now
the light’s not coming on. So they start experimenting with
more complicated sequences—press this button three times,
then this button once, then wait five seconds, and—ding!
Another point. But eventually that stops working. Perhaps it
doesn’t have to do with buttons at all, they think. Perhaps it
has to do with how I’m sitting. Or what I’m touching. Maybe
it has to do with my feet. Ding! Another point. Yeah, maybe
it’s my feet and then I press another button. Ding!