The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck
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Evil people never believe that they are evil; rather, they believe that
everyone else is evil.
In controversial experiments, now simply known as the Milgram
Experiments, named for the psychologist Stanley Milgram, researchers told
“normal” people that they were to punish other volunteers for breaking
various rules. And punish them they did, sometimes escalating the
punishment to the point of physical abuse. Almost none of the punishers
objected or asked for explanation. On the contrary, many of them seemed to
relish the certainty of the moral righteousness bestowed upon them by the
experiments.
The problem here is that not only is certainty unattainable, but the pursuit
of certainty often breeds more (and worse) insecurity.
Many people have an unshakable certainty in their ability at their job or in
the amount of salary they should be making. But that certainty makes them
feel worse, not better. They see others getting promoted over them, and they
feel slighted. They feel unappreciated and underacknowledged.
Even a behavior as simple as sneaking a peek at your boyfriend’s text
messages or asking a friend what people are saying about you is driven by
insecurity and that aching desire to be certain.
You can check your boyfriend’s text messages and find nothing, but
that’s rarely the end of it; then you may start wondering if he has a second
phone. You can feel slighted and stepped over at work to explain why you
missed out on a promotion, but then that causes you to distrust your
coworkers and second-guess everything they say to you (and how you think
they feel about you), which in turn makes you even less likely to get
promoted. You can keep pursuing that special someone you’re “supposed” to
be with, but with each rebuffed advance and each lonely night, you only
begin to question more and more what you’re doing wrong.
And it’s in these moments of insecurity, of deep despair, that we become
susceptible to an insidious entitlement: believing that we deserve to cheat a
little to get our way, that other people deserve to be punished, that we deserve
to take what we want, and sometimes violently.
It’s the backwards law again: the more you try to be certain about
something, the more uncertain and insecure you will feel.
But the converse is true as well: the more you embrace being uncertain
and not knowing, the more comfortable you will feel in knowing what you