More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Sarah Knight
Read between
December 13 - December 15, 2019
Please listen when I say that the shame and guilt you feel when you’re trying so hard to not give a fuck? It’s usually not because you are wrong to not give that fuck. It’s because you’re worried about what other people might think about your decision.
And guess what? You have no control over what other people think. For God’s sake, you have a hard enough time figuring out what you think! Believing that you have any control over what other people think — and wasting your fucks on that pursuit — is futile. It is a recipe for failure on a grand fucking scale.
When it comes to how your fuck-giving affects other people, all you can control is your behaviour with regard to th...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
When I was wrestling with the idea of quitting my corporate job to go freelance, I was extremely anxious about all aspects of my decision — chief among them, abandoning my “career-track” and dropping a bomb on my bank account. But I was also consumed with worry about what other people (friends, family, boss, colleagues) would think about my decision. Is she lazy? Capricious? Suddenly too rich to work? Doesn’t she care that the rest of us will have to step in and pick up the slack when she leaves?
Once I got a handle on the difference between giving a fuck about something, and giving a fuck about what other people think about what I give a fuck about, it all started falling into place.
There are two reasons you tend to give a fuck about what other people think: one, because you don’t want to be a bad person, and two, because you don’t want to look like a bad person.
If your fuck-giving actively affects someone else (such as declining to purchase a friend’s home-made peanut butter, or passing judgement on someone’s parenting choices), be honest and polite about your decision, try to make it about a difference of opinion, and 99 per cent of the time, all will be well.
But if your fuck-giving affects you and only you (such as not getting all tarted up just to go to the grocery store), then why should you care about what other people think? Let them have their opinions about your yoga pants and Ani DiFranco T-shirt; you’re comfortable and you won’t get hit on by the squirrelly checkout guy.