Early Retirement Extreme Forums

It's taken me a while to get here it seems, but today I realized the liberating truth that most people are too preoccupied with their own lives to really, genuinely care about what you're doing with yours, or what's happening in yours. I can now more clearly see why active listeners are so valued.

What's prompted you to arrive at this belief ?

Not much, just sharing what's been going on in my life as part of every day mutual conversation with people, and getting brief interest in return. I've tried my best to really listen to people when they speak, but perhaps that's rarer than I think. Also, inviting people to hangout only to be greeted with a version of "I'm too busy with X exam or Y essay or Z meeting." I hope to find a culture that doesn't prioritize work above everything else some day.

Part of my reasoning comes from a short book written by Epictetus. At some point he reasoned that if you break a ceramic cup, think of it like your neighbor broke a ceramic cup. Not as big of a deal if it happens to someone else, right? Well, similar deal with other parts of our lives. If your relationship breaks, although it might seem important to you, it might just be a commonplace happening to the average person you might speak to. This is likely also similar, then, with happenings like getting a job, quitting a job, travelling, etc. My point is to reduce my care for other people's opinions, because the truth is they probably don't care that much about what you do anyway.

a good insight

yeah, totally..

Along those lines, someone recently reminded me: "If you want to make friends, focus on being interested, not on being interesting"

Olaz wrote:I hope to find a culture that doesn't prioritize work above everything else some day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zE7PKRjrid4

Olaz wrote:It's taken me a while to get here it seems, but today I realized the liberating truth that most people are too preoccupied with their own lives to really, genuinely care about what you're doing with yours, or what's happening in yours. I can now more clearly see why active listeners are so valued.

The Spotlight Effect. People don't even care that you fall on your ass in public or wear funny clothes.