62. The subtle art of giving too much of a f***

I’ve not written one of these in a loooong ass time.

So, hello. Did you miss me?

Hmm, didn’t think so. 

Ah well, let’s crack on anyway…

I’m someone who tends to care a fair bit about a lot of stuff.

On one hand, that can be good. Having a degree of empathy and interest in things has its obvious benefits. 

On the other hand, the more stuff we care about (and the more we care about it), often the more bloody knackering it is. And that’s not necessarily good.

Naturally, there’s a lot of stuff we can give a shit about. 

Our health, our relationships, our careers, our finances, the opinions of others, everything that’s happening in the world, and so on and so forth. The list is basically endless. 

To state the obvious, all the above is important. 

The issue is that going balls deep in each and every one can be exhausting. And I sometimes find that the stress of trying to be all over each one of those, to potentially be more detrimental to us than being less so. As potentially ignorant and insensitive as that may sound. 

This website was initially set up with a mental health lens. And so, if having a bit more peace of mind is the goal, then one thing I’ve been mulling over is how much we should actually care about stuff?

Of course, there’s a school of thought that would argue that nothing actually matters. We’re all going to die, memories of our existence will soon perish, and it’s all completely meaningless. 

I mean, there are benefits to that worldview to be fair… but perhaps being completely nihilistic isn’t optimal?

On the flip side, as we said, caring about everything all of the time probably isn’t great either. 

I guess there’s likely some sort of optimal sweet spot between the two?

Oooh, I can sense a quote coming!!! 

Yes, as the ‘Father of American Psychology’ William James quipped:

“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”

Lovely stuff. 

It’s a separation between the trivial many, and the critical few. 

And I can’t help but think that the strategic ignorance of some (slash a significant amount of) stuff can be pretty beneficial to a calmer, and more internally peaceful life. 

This is an idea that I think is applicable to most areas of life. 

As such, let’s get a wider-life analogy in there... And one of my favourite ones, Jiu-Jitsu! 

Oh don’t groan, give it a chance!!!

Jiu-Jitsu is a sport with an almost infinite amount of moves. It’s one of the things that makes it so fun. Though because of that, the natural temptation is to try and learn everything.

However, by trying to learn absolutely everything, we find (or at least, I find...) that we (again, I..) end up doing everything sub-standardly. 

A much more effective approach seems to be to focus on less different moves, but to practise them more. Do less, but do it better. 

To squeeze another quote in there, and to stay on the martial arts theme, it’s the Bruce Lee thing “I fear not the man who has practised 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practised one kick 10,000 times”

The trade-off is doing lots of things poorly vs. doing a few things well. 

And to go back to the aforementioned goal of ‘having a bit more peace of mind’, I suppose the point is that it’s perhaps not optimal to try and do and care about everything. Instead, there’s possibly benefit in keeping the number of things we actually give a shit about to a deliberate minimum. 

Of course, without coming across as an insensitive arsehole.

I’m trying to get a little bit better at the first bit of that, though still struggling with the latter...