Motivation

Deciding You Do Not Care About Something

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If you are in the process of deciding you do not care about something, you need to think long and hard about whether these are your authentic feelings or rather an unconscious psychological solution due to your real desires being frustrated for long enough that attaining your goal seems unlikely.

As an example of what we are talking about, we can understand a lot of misanthropic behavior using the above paradigm. After your repeated efforts to connect socially are met with rejection, it’s easier on the psyche to decide you don’t need people and that you just don’t want to be around them than it is to entertain the notion that there might be some fundamental issue within you that needs tweaking.

We can see that deciding you do not care about something is a clever solution to deal with painful emotions, since if you can convince yourself you really don’t care these painful emotions disappear into thin air. It’s a way to transfer the power from your surroundings to yourself, seeming to increase your efficacy by believing that quitting whatever it is you are pursuing is due entirely to your own lack of interest in it.

Although this strategy does provide psychic relief the drawbacks are hopefully pretty obvious. You end up doing the exact opposite of what your deepest authentic desire is, trading possible insight for a rationalization. You replace engagement with life for disengagement, and you miss out on a valuable opportunity to learn something about yourself, and to keep going to ultimately reach your goal in spite of the setbacks.

If you’ve decided you don’t care about something, make sure you really don’t care about it anymore, that it’s not a psychological solution to help you cope with an emotionally painful truth.

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