How to Not Give a Fuck What People Think of You

“I don’t give a fuck” has become the mantra for our modern age. From drunk frat boys to angsty teenagers to people arguing in Facebook comments, it has become important for people to let other people know that they do not care what they think. This is ironic because if somebody feels the need to tell you they don’t give a fuck, they probably give a fuck. In reality, “I don’t give a fuck” usually means “I care deeply, but I don’t want to admit it.”

Why is giving a fuck so bad? And why has our culture become so obsessed with “not” giving a fuck? From dating to pop culture to news to business deals, it always seems like the “loser” in every transaction is the party that cares most.

People in our modern culture have become obsessed with not giving a fuck because human beings evolved to deeply care what others think of them. Humans evolved to live in tribes, and evolution keeps the tribe together and people acting correctly by wiring them to care deeply about what the “tribe” thinks of them. And by the “tribe,” I mean the alpha male. Emotionally speaking, NOT giving a fuck is very difficult because what the alpha male thinks of us determines whether we are accepted into the tribe or not. And whether we are accepted into the tribe or not determines whether he live or die in the jungle, and whether we have access to the resources we want and need to survive.

The subconscious desire to conform to the whims of the tribe is so strong, primal, and deeply ingrained that we often do not realize that we are giving a fuck or that we are altering our behavior to make other people happy. Most people want to think to themselves, at least consciously, that they are independent free thinkers that form beliefs and make decisions based on rational reasons and not emotion or peer pressure. But science and plain old observation clearly show that humans frequently irrationally change their behavior due to pressure from whoever seems to have power and authority.

At the same time, sometimes you SHOULD give a fuck what other people think. The world is too complicated to figure out everything on our own, so we largely rely on others to tell us what to believe and how to act. Without feedback from our community, we would become weird, antisocial psychopaths living in the woods like the Unabomber. We also need to be able to work together, understand the emotions of others, and take into account their feelings. And finally, nobody is perfect and we all need help and guidance from others to improve ourselves. Because we need to enmesh ourselves in a series of relationships to fulfill our emotional needs and to help us reach our highest potential we sometimes need to give a fuck.  

So when should you give a fuck? And when should you not give a fuck? And most importantly, HOW do you not give a fuck?

The challenge is to determine which of the feedback we are receiving from others has merit, and which of it does not have merit. Much of the feedback we get from others is wrong, which occurs for many reasons, including 1) the person giving the feedback is stupid, 2) the feedback is technically correct but is incomplete so it is unhelpful to us, 3) the feedback is not applicable to us, or 3) the person giving the feedback is consciously or subconsciously trying to manipulate us into doing something that is not good for us. Sometimes the feedback is wrong for more than one of these reasons at the same time.

To be able to discriminate between meritorious and non-meritorious feedback, you must do three things: 1) fulfill your emotional requirements so you feel confident and certain about what you are doing, so you can no longer be emotionally manipulated by others, 2) create for yourself a set of rational rules and boundaries for how to interact with other people and what you do for them, and 3) develop emotional intelligence to determine what other people want from you, and when/if you should give it to them.

In this article I hope to give a brief sketch of how to do these three things, and then later expand this article into a full-fledged book.

Fulfilling your emotional requirements

When your emotional requirements are not met, you are more likely to accept bad feedback and let others manipulate you because you rely on others to fulfill your emotional requirements. For example, your girlfriend may withhold sex or attention from you unless you do something she wants you to do. Or your boss may threaten to fire you, depriving you of your financial means of support, unless you do what he says. Any emotional need you have (love, affection, money, status) becomes a lever that others can use against you.

The two highest and strongest pleasures for any human beings are 1) the feeling of pursuing desirable purposes and 2) the feeling of being accepted into the tribe. Anxiety is a failure of #1. Depression is a failure of #2. If these emotional needs are filled, it will be much harder to manipulate you into doing things that are wrong for you. You will be more calm, confident, certain of your purposes, happy, and emotionally stimulated.

Of course, you are always vulnerable to manipulation because, even if your emotional needs are satisfied, no person is completely self-sufficient from a material standpoint. Everybody needs food, money, shelter and acceptance, and to some degree we are always dependent on others for these things. But if your emotional requirements are met, you will be much more able to go get these things by yourself without needing to rely on any particular person. Many emotionally weak people become dependent on others because they are afraid that they cannot get money, sex, or emotional fulfillment elsewhere. In turn, the “master” in these unhealthy relationships reinforces the slave’s belief that they are incapable of being emotionally fulfilled without the master. 

To pursue desirable purposes, you must conceptualize your desires, purposes, and emotions as a pyramid, with “lower” purposes supporting higher ones. At the bottom of the pyramid are your lowest purposes: eating, shitting, having sex, staying warm, etc… Those purposes must be satiated so you can pursue your higher purposes: lifting, having a successful career, maintaining good relationships, etc… At the top of the pyramid your highest purpose, the purpose which all lower purposes support, is your desire to venture into the unknown, defeat the threats that lay therein, and create a transcendent future reality that is infinitely better than your current reality.

The highest pleasure a person can feel in life is life is what I call “journey pleasure” – the feeling of making progress towards an appealing goal. When you see (or conceptualize) a pleasurable goal and take steps to achieve that pleasurable goal, and you do not feel like the path to the goal is blocked, you feel pleasure. As Artie Lange said, “the best part of doing cocaine is going to your dealer to get it.” The excitement and enthusiasm you feel on the way to something your subconscious thinks will be pleasurable is much stronger and longer-lasting than the destination pleasure you feel when you actually consume that thing. By ordering your purposes correctly, you can maximize your journey pleasure.

A person who feels journey pleasure will find it easier to control their emotions and think rationally because they will have less anxiety and because they will not be tempted by destination pleasure as much. Journey pleasure is stronger than destination pleasure, lasts over a longer period of time, and does not require external “things” so feeling journey pleasure will free you from the tyranny of destination pleasure. Destination pleasure only lasts for the brief moment while you consume the pleasurable thing and then disappears when the pleasurable thing disappears. You feel destination pleasure while you eat the cake, have sex, or hug you friend, but that pleasure is temporary and requires the pleasurable object. Journey pleasure, on the other hand, is primarily mental lasts for as long as you are working towards your goal, so you can feel it anytime and anywhere. If you are building your business, you can feel journey pleasure as you work, as you eat lunch, and even as you have a few beers with your friends to wind down, because all of those activities are taking you towards your goal. 

Journey pleasure is required for emotional stability and rationality. Humans are pleasure-seeking creatures, and we cannot think rationality if we are chasing one brief pleasure after another. But feeling journey pleasure satiates our desire for pleasure, and once we have a consistent source of journey pleasure we can make rational, long-term plans. Even people that enjoy journey pleasure need to feed their lower desires occasionally, but because their higher pleasures are satiated all of their thoughts and emotions are not directed towards satisfying their lower pleasure.

To feel accepted into the tribe, you must find a good group of friends that will love you relatively unconditionally. I say “relatively unconditionally” because all love is conditional: you would probably dump one of your friends if they were a serial killer or a child molester. But a good friend will be there for your reasonable ups and downs, and not condition their friendship on how much money or status you have or whether you let them manipulate you into doing things that are not in your best interest. You need a solid “tribe” that has accepted you so that when others reject you or try to manipulate you, you can run back to the warmth of your own tribe and not feel completely cast adriff in the wilderness. Humans need to feel acceptance, and if we do not have a solid group of people to accept us, we end up being vulnerable to being manipulated by those who do not have our best interests in mind.

Creating a set of rational rules and boundaries

Because most people are emotionally dependent on others for acceptance, they rely on others to define for them what is “right” and “wrong.” The human need for acceptance is so strong that we often subjugate all of our other thoughts, beliefs, and other emotions in favor of our need for acceptance. We often even let the tribe dictate our moral and religious beliefs. Think about it: most people who are born and raised in Christian countries become Christian, whereas most people born and raised in Muslim countries become Muslim. Now do you really think that all of those Christians rationally analyzed Christianity and rationally determined that it is superior to Islam and all those Muslims rationally analyzed Islam and determined that it is superior to Christianity? Of course not. People in Christian countries are Christian because their society pressured them into being Christian and people in Muslim countries are Muslim because their society pressured them into being Muslim. Of course, it is possible that one of Islam or Christianity is a rationally defensible religion to follow, but even if it was, that’s not why people follow it – they follow it because of the pressure of the tribe. 

To become an independent, self-actualized person, however, you must create a set of rational rules and boundaries that will guide your behavior in interpersonal relationships so you no longer rely on other people to tell you how to act. This will take a lot of work – the world is a complex place and you will run into a lot of morally difficult situations where you will be pressured to act in the wrong way. Building a set of rational rules will take a lot of time, reading, thinking, and experimentation, but it is the only way to act independently. In addition, you must constantly re-analyze and re-assess your rules in case you adopted a bad rule or boundary.

I am not going to tell you all the rules and boundaries you must adopt. Your rules and boundaries will be influenced by your religion, your moral beliefs, your society, your temperament, and other factors that are unique to you. All I can give you is a few principles that I think should guide your formulation of your rules.

First, you should never do anything for anybody that they would not do for you. If you want to get really strict, you can expand this rule to say that you will not do anything for anybody that they have not already done for you. A logical corollary to this rule is that you will not do not anything for anybody that does not have your best interests at heart – if somebody is taking from you without giving anything in return, they probably do not have your best interests at heart. If somebody conditions their relationship with you on you giving them money or other favors that they are not giving you back, then you are not in a relationship – you are paying for a prostitute. This sounds obvious and a rule of basic fairness, but articulating this rule to yourself will help you stick to it when you are actually in a situation where somebody is manipulating you.

Second, your rules must be structured in such a way that you do not let anybody interfere with your pursuit of your purposes. If somebody wants you to do something that infringes on your purpose pyramid, you must say no. Your highest pleasure and the most important thing in your life is your purpose, so if you let others interfere with it, they do not have your best interests at heart. The only possible exception to this rule is a sick family member that is helpless on their own through no fault of their own. But even in the latter case you condition your help to them in the way that interferes with your purposes in the smallest possible way.

Third, your rules should lead to an outcome that is good for the person asking for your help. If somebody wants you to do something that is self-destructive for them (for example, buying cocaine), you should not help them. I say this not only because is it morally wrong to do thing for others that hurts them, but also because if you feed somebody’s counterproductive addictions, you just strengthen that addiction that make them more likely to seek that thing from you again.

Once you learn how to set boundaries, you will come to respect other people’s boundaries as well. People that are easily manipulated often expect too much from other people as well, so they often feel disappointed and rejected. For example, a lot of guys who let women walk all over them also get very angry at women who do not reciprocate their advances. These guys fail to realize that just as a woman is not entitled to get X, Y, and Z thing from him just because she flirted with him a little, the man is not entitled to get X, Y, and Z thing from just because he bought her a drink. Relationships should be based on a mutual assent where each side agrees to bring the other party in. If she didn’t agree to do something, you should not expect it from her, and if you did not agree to something, she should not expect it from you.  

Developing emotional intelligence

To analyze whether feedback has merit, you need to be able to read the intentions of the person giving the feedback, and to be able to read peoples’ intentions, you need emotional intelligence and situational awareness.

You are constantly receiving feedback from all kinds of people. Some of that feedback you need to immediately ignore, some of it you need to immediately act on, and for some of it you need to do additional research. Because you do not have the time to do additional research on every single piece of feedback you get, you need “shortcuts” to determine what feedback has merit and what does not. One shortcut to gauge how much you should “trust” somebody giving feedback is to analyze their motivations. Why are they giving you this feedback? How would they benefit?

For example, if your best friend told you “hey dude, your car really sucks. It is probably going to break down and you will never get any girls driving a car like that,” you may decide to do some research into buying a new car because you assume your best friend is looking out for your best interests. But if a used car dealer told you the same thing, you are more likely to write off his opinion because you assume he is only saying that because he wants to sell you a car. Similarly, if your mother asked you for money, you may decide to give it to her if she needed it for surgery, but not if she was going to use it on gambling. Those are two extreme, obvious examples, but you make these types of calculations all the time, often without thinking, when receiving feedback from people.

To understand peoples’ motivations, you must look at a wide variety of factors: how do they benefit from you accepting this feedback, is there something about their background that makes them likely to give this feedback, your relationship to them, their history, what you know about people like this, etc… If somebody made a bunch of money in real estate, they are likely to tell you to invest in real estate because that is all they know, not because it is necessarily a good investment. If somebody got burned in a real estate deal, they may irrationally tell you to avoid real estate, not because real estate is bad, but because they were stupid and got burned.

Ultimately, you also need to build a knowledge base about how the world works. Once you meet and understand a variety of manipulative people, you will understand how they operate and will be able to resist their charms. You will also learn when people are serious with their demands and when they are bluffing. You will learn when people have vital information that could help and when they are making shit up. There is no substitute for this experience; you just have to learn it in the real world.

To develop the emotional intelligence to evaluate people’s intentions you need to be emotionally fulfilled. If you are not emotionally fulfilled, you will be needy, which will cause you to fail to think rationally. For example, a lot of men and women become lonely and desperate for a relationship, so if somebody shows them any attention or interest, they automatically assume that the person actually likes them. They become blind to reality because they are so desperate for love. But if they were emotionally fulfilled, they could look at the person’s intentions objectively.

For example, I am an attractive guy and I do pretty well with women, but I know that if a gorgeous blonde in a slutty dress walks up to me in a bar and immediately starts showing me heavy interest with no action on my part, I will know that she probably wants something from me. Most people

Conclusion

Finally, the last skill you need to learn to stop giving a fuck what people think is the ability to have faith and leap into the unknown. You never know what will happen when you hold your boundaries until you try it. After you successfully hold your boundaries a few times, you will learn that not only are you strong enough to hold your boundaries, but often times the people trying to give you bad feedback back down and respect you more.

Shitty people live in the same world as everybody else. They generally know what is right and wrong, they know what is and is not acceptable, and they are constantly stopped in their efforts at manipulation by other people who do hold their boundaries. Shitty people oftentimes try to act like they live in a different reality, and that if you do not accept their bizarre rules of how humans interact, you will be unable to have a relationship with them. Oftentimes they present this front so convincingly that people think they have no choice but to cave. But the reality is that shitty people know they are being shitty, and instead of living by a different set of rules in general, they are just making a different set of rules for you. Once you stand up to them and teach them there will be no different set of rules for you, they usually respect you more. And if they don’t, they should not have been in your life in the first place.