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I was recently surfing the popular question-and-answer website Quora where someone posed the question, “What are the top 10 things that we should be informed about in life?” One of the answers in the top response stuck out at me:1
1. Realize that nobody cares, and if they do, you shouldn’t care that they care. Got a new car? Nobody cares. You’ll get some gawkers for a couple of weeks—they don’t care. They’re curious. Three weeks in it’ll be just another shiny blob among all the thousands of others crawling down the freeway and sitting in garages and driveways up and down your street. People will care about your car just as much as you care about all of those. Got a new gewgaw? New wardrobe? Went to a swanky restaurant? Exotic vacation? Nobody cares. Don’t base your happiness on people caring, because they won’t. And if they do, they either want your stuff or hate you for it.
Emphasis mine. On the surface, this quote is damn depressing. But when you look a bit deeper, it’s absolutely liberating.
People don’t care about the amount of success you have, or the fancy things you surround yourself with. In fact, they probably don’t care much about much of anything you do.
When you realize that most people don’t care about your success, money, clothes, or car, you realize that you’re freer than you originally thought. You can begin to think about taking more risks because your life isn’t set in stone. And you realize that life is too short to put a ton of weight into what other people think.
Learning that no one cares might just be the best thing that ever happened to you.
Source: http://www.quora.com/Life/What-are-the-top-10-things-that-we-should-be-informed-about-in-life ↩
