Sharing is Caring
Who cares!? Well, I do but, not as deeply when it’s something that is unworthy of taking a place in my mind. I’ve said it before that when I learned to ‘not sweat the small stuff,’ life got a little bit sweeter. I am now at a point where I get so turned off when someone else gets so caught up in something so trivial. It honestly eats away at me watching from the outside.
I think oftentimes we forget that we are able to pick and choose what we put our effort into. We blindly let our sentiments get the best of us and this brings us down a rabbit hole of unnecessary emotional effort and wasted time. Two lines I recently read in a medium story perfectly sum up how to combat this from a stoic point of view:
Acting Independently of other people’s opinions is one of the basic tenets of stoicism.
To achieve the good life, what we need to do is conform to what is virtuous and not to what others think.
We get caught up. Reading back to the first paragraph I can see that I am still caught up in telling you that some things that others do or think still eats away at me. The fact that I can realize it, point it out, and then work it out is the breakthrough. I just want everyone else to realize it too. I’m not one to impose my beliefs on any person but instead, I share what’s helped me and hear their feedback to make for a meaningful and educational conversation.
The fact is though, that we are going to interact with those individuals who don’t care about anything at all; Good, bad, emotional, or meaningless. Those who don’t put any effort or all of their effort into anything that presents itself to them. I envy and also deplore these people at the same time. This school of thinking (absurdist or nihilist maybe?) has always intrigued me and I think I have much more to learn about it from a psychological standpoint.
Most people understand that we must coexist with individuals whose beliefs differ from our own. Not everyone understands we must tolerate and except those people as well. It’s so easy and so difficult at the same time because we all value our own opinions so much.
For today and hopefully every day I will continue to put my emotional effort into the things that I deem worthy. But, at the same time, I need to try to understand that what’s important to me might not be as important to the person I’m engaging with. I need to continue on my stoic journey but simultaneously be genuinely sensitive to those who don’t prescribe to that same journey.