The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F_ck

And the craziest part of all this is that Erin embodies all the
lessons she’s learned to a T. She has her dream. She stays
persistent with it. She visualizes and takes action and
weathers the rejections and failures and gets up and tries
again. She’s relentlessly positive. She thinks pretty damn
highly of herself. I mean, she claims to heal cats the same
way Jesus healed Lazarus—come the fuck on.
And yet her values are so fucked that none of this
matters. The fact that she does everything “right” doesn’t
make her right.
There is a certainty in her that refuses to relinquish itself.
She has even told me this in so many words: that she knows
her fixation is completely irrational and unhealthy and is
making both her and me unhappy. But for some reason it
feels so right to her that she can’t ignore it and she can’t
stop.
In the mid-1990s, psychologist Roy Baumeister began
researching the concept of evil. Basically, he looked at
people who do bad things and at why they do them.
At the time it was assumed that people did bad things
because they felt horrible about themselves—that is, they
had low self-esteem. One of Baumeister’s first surprising
findings was that this was often not true. In fact, it was
usually the opposite. Some of the worst criminals felt pretty
damn good about themselves. And it was this feeling good
about themselves in spite of the reality around them that
gave them the sense of justification for hurting and
disrespecting others.
For individuals to feel justified in doing horrible things to
other people, they must feel an unwavering certainty in
their own righteousness, in their own beliefs and
deservedness. Racists do racist things because they’re
certain about their genetic superiority. Religious fanatics
blow themselves up and murder dozens of people because
they’re certain of their place in heaven as martyrs. Men