The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F_ck

first time since I could remember, I was worthy. My craving
for validation quickly fed into a mental habit of selfaggrandizing
and overindulgence. I felt entitled to say or do
whatever I wanted, to break people’s trust, to ignore
people’s feelings, and then justify it later with shitty, halfassed
apologies.
While this period certainly had its moments of fun and
excitement, and I met some wonderful women, my life was
more or less a wreck the whole time. I was often
unemployed, living on friends’ couches or with my mom,
drinking way more than I should have been, alienating a
number of friends—and when I did meet a woman I really
liked, my self-absorption quickly torpedoed everything.
The deeper the pain, the more helpless we feel against
our problems, and the more entitlement we adopt to
compensate for those problems. This entitlement plays out
in one of two ways:
1. I’m awesome and the rest of you all suck, so I deserve
special treatment.
2. I suck and the rest of you are all awesome, so I deserve
special treatment.
Opposite mindset on the outside, but the same selfish
creamy core in the middle. In fact, you will often see entitled
people flip back and forth between the two. Either they’re
on top of the world or the world is on top of them,
depending on the day of the week, or how well they’re doing
with their particular addiction at that moment.
Most people correctly identify a person like Jimmy as a
raging narcissistic ass-hat. That’s because he’s pretty
blatant in his delusionally high self-regard. What most
people don’t correctly identify as entitlement are those
people who perpetually feel as though they’re inferior and
unworthy of the world.