The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck

Hiroo Onoda returned to Japan in 1974 and became a kind of celebrity in
his home country. He was shuttled around from talk show to radio station;
politicians clamored to shake his hand; he published a book and was even
offered a large sum of money by the government.
But what he found when he returned to Japan horrified him: a
consumerist, capitalist, superficial culture that had lost all of the traditions of
honor and sacrifice upon which his generation had been raised.
Onoda tried to use his sudden celebrity to espouse the values of Old
Japan, but he was tone-deaf to this new society. He was seen more as a
showpiece than as a serious cultural thinker—a Japanese man who had
emerged from a time capsule for all to marvel at, like a relic in a museum.
And in the irony of ironies, Onoda became far more depressed than he’d
ever been in the jungle for all those years. At least in the jungle his life had
stood for something; it had meant something. That had made his suffering
endurable, indeed even a little bit desirable. But back in Japan, in what he
considered to be a vacuous nation full of hippies and loose women in
Western clothing, he was confronted with the unavoidable truth: that his
fighting had meant nothing. The Japan he had lived and fought for no longer
existed. And the weight of this realization pierced him in a way that no bullet
ever had. Because his suffering had meant nothing, it suddenly became
realized and true: thirty years wasted.
And so, in 1980, Onoda packed up and moved to Brazil, where he
remained until he died.
The Self-Awareness Onion
Self-awareness is like an onion. There are multiple layers to it, and the more
you peel them back, the more likely you’re going to start crying at
inappropriate times.
Let’s say the first layer of the self-awareness onion is a simple
understanding of one’s emotions. “This is when I feel happy.” “This makes
me feel sad.” “This gives me hope.”
Unfortunately, there are many people who suck at even this most basic
level of self-awareness. I know because I’m one of them. My wife and I
sometimes have a fun back-and-forth that goes something like this: