Don't give so many damns

The less you give a damn, the happier you’ll be.

I came across this saying while randomly trawling the Internet the other day for funny pictures of cats and other entertaining things, and it really struck a chord with me.

But surprisingly, not all that many people agreed with me. So I had to take a second to think about it, and I realised that there could be a lot of different interpretations to this one seemingly simple and innocent phrase. 

“Oh, so if you just go through life not caring about anyone else and doing whatever you want you’ll be happier? Sure, maybe if you’re an insensitive asshole with no conscience.”

Woah there! Just because I liked the saying doesn’t automatically mean I want to hand in my nice card and become a complete douchebag. 

 “Well if you don’t give a damn about anything, that means you have no ambition to become anything better."

And it also doesn’t mean that I want to quit my job and move into my mother’s basement for the rest of my worthless life, simply spending my days walking around being an asshole to people all the time. 

“So does that mean you want to grow old and die alone? Because if you don’t give a damn about anything – how can you ever love someone and be in a successful relationship?”

I definitely don’t want to live in my mother’s basement all alone, except for my 39 cats – who I’m a total asshole to all the time.

So, now that that’s all cleared up. I don’t think that you shouldn’t give a damn about anything. You shouldn’t suddenly stop caring about other people and how your actions affect them. You shouldn’t completely give up on anything you care about.

It just means that you shouldn’t give so many damns all the time.

There is a balance – there are things you should care about, and some things that just aren’t worth caring about so much. So to me, the phrase 'The less you give a damn, the happier you'll be' doesn't necessitate the extreme that not caring about anything at all is the ultimate level of happiness. To me it simply means that if you cut back on your cares a bit, you might be a lot happier. Make sense? It’s kind of like ‘don’t sweat the small stuff’.

Sometimes we just need to have the guts (or maybe the anger) to not care too much – so that we can have the freedom to live life on our own terms.

We just need to know when not to give a damn.

And for me, that’s when something is negatively affecting my life. I’ve decided to not allow negative things in my life to get me down. So instead of obsessing about all the little things in my life that I’m not happy about – I simply let them go. Anything negative is put out of my mind. And it’s true – I do think I’ve been a lot happier because of it. 

Sometimes it’s okay to not give a damn.

Hakuna Matata!

It's a problem free philosophy!

  

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