The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck

respectfully or replied angrily, nothing ever changed. Her mind never
changed; her beliefs never budged. This had gone on for over seven years by
then (and counting).
And so it was, in that small sushi restaurant, with Erin guzzling sake and
babbling for hours about how she’d cured her cat’s kidney stones with energy
tapping, that something occurred to me:
Erin is a self-improvement junkie. She spends tens of thousands of dollars
on books and seminars and courses. 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 rape and abuse women out of their certainty that they’re
entitled to women’s bodies.