Helpfully indifferent: Don’t care about everything

Like many people, I’ve certainly fallen into the trap of caring about too many things, having to have an opinion about too many things.
Sometimes it seems like, through most of my life, if any topic was brought up, I would have to decide what my opinion was on it.
I guess that’s what they call being an opinionated person.
Not always a very useful or effective approach, to have to always make some kind of judgement, make some kind of evaluation of simply everything that crosses in front of me.
Maybe I just had a hard time ever acknowledging that I don’t know something.
It was always difficult.
Those three words “I don’t know” seem to be so often difficult to say.
It’s like revealing some kind of a secret weakness that I can’t admit that I don’t actually have an answer about that particular topic.
And going even further than not having an established opinion about a topic would be to say that not only do I not know about the topic, but I really don’t care.
That I found to be especially difficult for me to say, because it seems like it’s hard for me to not care about something.
I mean, it’s not to say it’s not important.
it would be like for me to say I don’t care about something, it seems like that’s what I’m saying.
It seems like if I don’t care, that somehow I’m saying that the thing is not important.
But as a result, it seems like that leads to having to care about everything, and just what happens is an overload of things to care about, just multiplying, filling my attention, demanding more of my attention, demanding more of my energy.
For so many things, it’s hard to really argue that they’re not important, if there are things that are important to other people, there could be important things going on in the news, things going on around the world, there could be important issues that are being brought to my attention.
It seems like to just say “I don’t care”, there’s something kind of shameful in the idea of not caring about something that is important.
But it seems like there is a special power that comes from being able to simply let go of things, no matter how important they might be, to simply say “I don’t care.
I am indifferent to this thing.” And it’s not necessarily a judgment that this thing is not worthy of caring about, but simply that I choose to not spend my energy on that thing.
I choose not to spend my attention, my focus, my resources, my concentration, my efforts.
All these things are being used elsewhere, on the things that I choose to focus on, the things that I consider to be most important for myself in my present situation.
It’s like being asked to give money to a worthy cause.
Not choosing to donate to the cause saying “No, I choose not to do that”, does kind of have this feeling of oh, you know, am I saying that this cause is not important? Or, like, what am I what am I saying by not contributing my money to the cause? There’s a little bit of awkwardness in it.
And yet, we know that we can’t give money to every possible cause that we come across.
We would quickly spend all our money.
And yet, once again, this is an area where we don’t treat our time and energy, these resources, limited resources, that we have: we often don’t treat them with the same carefulness that we treat our money.
[…] I find there’s a great power and a great utility in being able to be OK with not caring about a very, very long list of things.
Simply being indifferent as the default state for any issue, a default state of indifference, in that I do not invest any energy in it automatically.
Just like with money, there’s a default state of “I do not spend my money.
I do not buy that.” Unless I choose specifically to spend my money on this thing, the default is, as we’re surrounded by “buy buy buy buy buy”, the default state is “No buy.
I’m not spending any money on that, until I specifically choose.” What if it’s the same with our attention and our energy? I choose not to invest in anything as the default beginning point, until I deliberately and specifically choose to invest my energy in a specific thing.
[…] If we choose to specifically invest our energy in specific issues that we choose, and we choose how we are going to care about them, what are we are going to do about them with our energy, become conscious investors of our attention and our energy, it seems to me like that would lead to an overall better result than simply scattering attention and energy towards everything that we see out of a immediate emotional reaction, or out of a sense of duty and responsibility that we should care.
Instead, we can choose to focus our care into the things that we believe matter most to us.
So I would be curious to hear any feedback on this topic.
Are there things that we should care about no matter what? What are the things that you choose or choose not to care about?

#caretoomuch #indifference #idontcare

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