Imagine this:
You are turned back into a 14 year old with all of your present memories intact. How would you behave?
Would you care about what other 9th grader classmates think of you?
Would you follow the latest shows and gossip so that your friends think of you as “cool”?
Would you do what is best for you or would you do what impresses your other 14 year old friends?
Let’s be real. You would not give a flying fuck what a bunch of other 14 year old kids thought of you.
You won’t try to be cool, you won’t try to impress anyone, and you sure as hell won’t waste your time following high school gossip to stay “socially relevant”.
You focus on doing your own thing and would simply not care about your “peers”.
Why do you give a fuck about what other people think now, in your present body and age?
The answer is that you care for the same reason that you cared when you actually were a 14 year old kid: You just lack the experience to see the bigger picture.
If the 20 year older version of you was transported into your present state, he wouldn’t care about random opinions just like you wouldn’t if you were transported back into your high school self.
In the big picture, most things become irrelevant in 10 years.
There’s actually a chance that you might not even survive 10 years… so that makes meaningless stuff even more meaningless.
Lesson From A Bad Terminal Diagnosis
A few years ago, a doctor misdiagnosed me with end stage kidney disease and made me think I was going to die soon.
I had foamy urine and went to see a nephrologist.
The words out of the doctor’s mouth were “This is a sign of protein in your urine. Your kidneys are failing. I give you 10 years to live.”
Needless to say, I was scared. I had to get a bunch of tests over a year and as it turns out, I am completely fine.
I had multiple 24 hour urine protein tests, urine protein creatinine ratio tests, dipstick tests, kidney function blood tests, and liver function tests for over a year and turns out that everything was completely fine with me.
In other words, the “doctor” was a retard. I had no protein in my urine and I was completely fine.
The main thing I learned that year is that once you get some kind of serious health issue (or think you have a serious health issue), everything else goes mute.
You stop giving a fuck about anything other than what you want to do. It gives you a kind of tunnel vision.
All non-factors just become invisible to you because you’re dying.
But guess what.
You are dying. Even if you’re not sick.
Maybe not in 10 years, but in 50 or 60. Or tomorrow. Who knows.
Sick people are just more aware that they’re dying.
You “know” death is coming, but you’re not consciously aware of it.
The human mind hides the reality of death as a protective mechanism. We all “know” it’s going to happen, but you never think it’ll happen to you. But it will.
Just like how you “know” you wouldn’t care about random people’s opinions in 10 years, but still do because the 10 year perspective is not consciously in your head.
If you truly want to stop giving a fuck, you gotta think like a dying man… because you are a dying man. You gotta think “will I care about this in 10 years”, and let it go if you will not.
This is how you become mentally and emotionally free to pursue what YOU want (not what society wants of you) without letting anything get in the way.
That’s all for today.
Hope that helps.
Your man,
Harsh Strongman