Maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s Maybelline. I don’t know. But let me just put this out there for you and see how it hits you.
Nobody cares how you feel.
On the surface, this may seem either:
- Obvious
- Sad, or
- Both of the above
The correct answer, however, is that (4) none of the above are true.
Nobody cares how you feel.
This is not as obvious as it seems. And it’s the very opposite of sad because once you have a proper understanding of that five-word string, you will be set free.
Many of us, myself included, have been brought up (i.e. led by either internal misunderstanding or external conditioning) to believe that other people care intensely about our feelings. The people who like us, it would seem, want us to feel good. And the people who don’t like us want us to feel bad, right?
Wrong.
Everybody is indifferent to your feelings. Even (in some contexts) you (simple example: present-you doesn’t care that much how future-you feels; if he did, he’d never touch sugar: eating candy, even in small amounts, is a victory for present indifference to the future; now, I’m definitely not saying that restricted candy consumption is as bad as the kind of candy-a$$ diet that gets people featured on My 600-Pound Life (it isn’t), I’m just saying that it’s a small example of you not caring how you feel).
Let me explain.
Nobody cares how you feel. Everybody is completely absorbed in how THEY feel. And even when they seem to care about how you feel, what they’re actually concerned with is with how THEY feel about how they THINK you feel. Read that last sentence again. Notice how the “you” part is almost incidental, an afterthought. The real issue is THEM, THEIR thought. Not you. You are like scenery observed from a moving car: transient, temporary, there and gone.
Admittedly, this (“how THEY feel about how they THINK you feel”) is a fine distinction, but a very important one; we’re not just splitting hairs here. We’re saying that it’s all smoke and mirrors. And that matters, because while not all illusions are bad to believe in, many are, including the illusion that your internal emotional states are significant to other human beings. Newsflash: they never are, they never were, and they never will be — not even with improved technology.
There is a baseline isolation or separation that exists between you and everyone else and I know that sounds horrible; it sounds awful; it sounds like a line from Neon Genesis Evangelion — but it doesn’t have to be any of these things. This isn’t an excuse to go all Chester Bennington and be irresponsible and self-destructive because (surprise) using sad words and physicality can get you hurt real bad; one simply can’t go around crowing lyrics like that boy did and not be affected by them.
Put another way, we want to be juuust perceptive enough to see through social B.S. but not so “perceptive” that we despair totally, forgetting to enjoy ourselves, forgetting to enjoy the ride. After all, we know movies aren’t real but that doesn’t (or shouldn’t) stop us enjoying the good ones: it simply allows us to sidestep the bad ones #avoid #ignore #stopPlaying #disconnect 😀 . We want a fine-tunable detachment, not total desolation.
So, how can you actually use these insights for more than just pretending to be deep so you can bang yoga chicks </notSpeakingFromActualExperience>. What does all this mean practically? Well, it means that you can feel however the heck you want about yourself, about your life, about your performance, about anything and everything. There are no feeling police. There are perception (perceived feeling) police, and they might come for you like they came for Queen Elizabeth in 1997, but your actual feelings are yours to have, yours to keep, yours to feel, in any and every way you want, all the time. Forever and ever.
You can feel happy all the time. You don’t need a reason. You don’t need a justification. You don’t need pre-requisites. And you sure as sugar don’t need permission. You’re free, dude. Nobody cares. Nobody is watching you. Nobody is thinking about you. And even when they seem to be thinking “about” you, they’re actually only thinking of what they think about you.
It’s the difference between the real and the virtual. It’s the difference between a pipe and a picture of a pipe. It’s the difference between a real person and a poorly hand-drawn picture of a person. The way you feel is the real you. The way other people feel “about you” is really just what they feel about a crude and hopelessly inaccurate hand drawing of you that only exists in their own minds. Now, it’s certainly nice to have hand drawings of you looked upon with favor, but it would be foolish — deeply ill-advised — to take any of it seriously.
Unfortunately for you, I am not good with words. Or perhaps human language itself is still too underdeveloped to express theses kinds of ideas. Perhaps a bit of both. Either way, I don’t know if I’ve truly communicated what was in my head to you. But an attempt was made. And that counts 😉 . While I could sit around and act tortured and profound and confused, that kind of tragic heroine behavior wouldn’t actually help either of us. So, instead, I’m choosing to feel awesome about it (lol).
Nobody cares. Nobody can care. Nobody can eat a picture of a rice-cake. So take the funnest option 😉 . Run through the emotion supermarket and take anything off any shelf you want. Go nuts. It’s all yours and it’s all free. You’re free.
Enjoy your language. Play with Japanese. Write Japanese. Speak it. Hear it. Go crazy. Enjoy yourself.