How to Stop Giving a Fuck What People Think | Hacker News Reader

How to Stop Giving a Fuck What People Think

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24 pointssarreph19 comments

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When you are someone who lacks self-confidence or whose actions are determined by how others will think of you (taken to the extreme), this may very well be good advice. This is the type of advice that helps me personally, since I have struggled with the anxiety caused by worrying too much about other people's opinion of me.

However, while this may be a good quick-fix solution to self-confidence issues, I wouldn't say it's a very good way to live life in general. We're not isolated in this world, and other people's thoughts and opinions do matter. But if someone worries _too_ much about what other people think, this may be the type of article that helps shock them out of their current state.

This is a pretty good way to limit your friends network, though. For example, feminists and other sjws often will delete you from everything and start a witch hunt trying to fire you, get all your friends to hate you, and so on if you "confess" to being an egalitarian and/or say anything that indicates rival theories for things outside of their ideology, like the scientific method, might have some validity.

Religion used to be like this (and still is in many developing countries, along with an uncomfortably large segment of the US), but it has to some extent grown much more milder in portions of the community. However, cult like thinking takes many forms, and inadvertently contradicting a cultist may very well become an aspiration crushing torment to the novice idgaf-er.

I guess it's all about taking baby steps at first. And sometimes antidepressants.

The rest of the article aside, I really like the notion of travelling alone, at least once. It reminds me of a quote from one of my favourite movies, Into the Wild.

”The sea's only gifts are harsh blows, and occasionally the chance to feel strong. Now, I don't know much about the sea, but I do know that that's the way it is here. And I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong, but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once, to find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions, facing the blind, deaf stone alone with nothing to help you but your hands and your own head. “

Not that you have to hitchhike alone to the Alaskan wilderness! Thats extreme of course.

This is bad. The advice given perpetuates the myth you are an individual completely separate from the world outside of it, the very feeling that alienates you from other people and the feeling behind the animosity that we feel towards others. The only way to be at peace with world( and people who live in it) is to realize that you are the world not a part of it.

"The advice given perpetuates the myth you are an individual completely separate from the world outside of it" <--- where in the article does it say anything like that?

>> the myth you are an individual completely separate from the world outside

Aren't you?

You were born alone, you will die alone, nobody can live your life for you, nobody can share the responsibility for your decisions.

You are alone. Everyone else is a script. The only thing that matters is whether your actions make you happy without a hangover. Why would you worry about anyone else's judgments?

(Sick people, who are made happy by abusing neighbors, will always exist, but they are, luckily, not numerous.)

Nobody is an island. Human existence is a collaboration, but people do need to do things for themselves. You just described narcissism.

>> Aren't you?

Yes if you choose to identify yourself with small part of your being called the consciousness.

I don't find that view of self particularly appealing, I prefer to view my ego as part of me as my leg is a part me. You are not the image that you have constructed for yourself shaped by the society you live in. I don't want to identify myself with a tiny portion of thoughts that my mind has, I am not my ego.

Reminds me of the title of a book by Richard Feynman -"What Do You Care What Other People Think?" http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Do_You_Care_What_Other_P...

Exercise is also effective at reducing emotional reactions to painful stimuli

http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsweek/Exercise-and-Depressi...

But what about downvotes and hellbans?

Also, it's hard to take this advice seriously, when the title of the article engages in polite self-censorship by partially masking foul language with asterisks.

Clearly, the author doesn't care what you think of his polite self-censorship. :-)

I think there are two sides of this question.

The first is common decency: don't hurt others unnecessarily, don't be an ass, or you feel guilt.

The other is a matter of shame: worrying about the disapproval of others for something you did.

I want to be more proactive about being good to people around me in ways that matter to them.

I am also trying to do more things which create my "shame" feeling, because as this piece says the feeling is generally unnecessary and irrelevant to the feelings of the people around me. I try to do things I am uncomfortable with, or if the only thing holding me back is some vague sense others might disapprove. Really, most of the time they just don't care.

From that perspective, if you really think it will hurt some of your readers to spell out the words, and you don't have a significant reason to do so, censoring them is perfectly in line with his philosophy.

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