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Look, I just can’t be bothered to spend time caring about orphans.
Okay, I know that sounds bad. Let me explain.
I’ve decided that orphans matter less to me than people closer in proximity to me with smaller problems.
Fuck, that sounds bad too. Let me back up a little bit more.
You can passively care about as many problems in the world as you want. I do passively care about orphans. I look at their situation and think, “Fuck, that sucks.” If there was a bill to make sure orphans got a thing of Go-Gurt every day, I’d totally vote in favor of it, and so should you. Don’t be a dick. Vote yes on Prop 42 ensuring orphan Go-Gurt.
Point being, your capacity to passively care about things on this surface level is basically infinite.
But your time and energy aren’t. They’re extremely finite. This means your attention and effort are extremely valuable. This means that your capacity to actively care about things is heavily restricted.
This means that if you’re like most of us, you probably need to care about less shit.
This can be hard. When you go outside, you are bombarded with overwhelming multitudes of awful problems. You’re breathing increasingly filthy air, seeing unfuckable and irredeemable monsters dragging around 8 kids, watching as the planet dies, watching people exploit each other for personal gain, and right there, in front of your face…the continued existence of Jack in the Box.
You can’t devote energy to fixing all of that. You have to make some cuts. So I don’t want to tell you how to live, but maybe worry not so much about the GMOs at Jack in the Box, and instead allow them continue to pour salted garbage down peoples’ throats. There are bigger problems out there.
In fact, one of our biggest problems as people is that we do worry about the Jack in the Boxes of the world. We let every last problem take our attention and energy. We forget about our fight for net neutrality because they’re doing a gritty reboot of Care Bears, and we’re outraged that they’re going to somehow, “ruin my childhood.”
This happens with legitimate problems too. We start to focus in on the problem of terrorism, and aw fuck, there’s a new super malaria, it costs an arm and a leg to fix our arms and our legs, and…shit! Hand sanitizer might give me cancer? My phone is created by suicidal slaves, and also might give me cancer?
We are constantly pulled into new directions for what we’re supposed to worry about, so the result of this is simple: Nothing gets tackled, nothing gets fixed, nothing changes. The rapid fire nature of modern information ensures that we’re always too distracted by the next problem to do anything about the current one.
It’s not that all of those problems don’t matter, because they do. And if you pretend that problems and people outside of your circle actually don’t matter, you’re an asshole.
But they can’t occupy you. There’s not enough of you to go around, and you can’t forget that.
So what you need is a Give a Shit Fantasy Team–the ultimate list (or team) of things you would focus on in your perfect world. And then you need to stop worrying about everything else, and focus only on those. Don’t care about Malaria? Tell it to fuck off. You’ve got childhood obesity to focus on.
And sorry, but I’m making my call. I just can’t worry about orphans. I understand they’re superstars in the Give a Shit Fantasy League, but I’m not drafting them onto my team. I’m going with a Give a Shit Fantasy Team of drastic campaign finance reform, resisting that gross thing in the white house, and trying to make people less dipshitty.
This principle goes far beyond your causes of choice though. You need a Give a Shit Fantasy Team for your entire life.
Drop The “Orphans” of Your Life
(God, that doesn’t stop sounding bad.)
You’re constantly presented new possibilities and things to potentially give a shit about. You’re given new opportunities, new courses to take, books to read, movies you HAVE to see, new career paths worth considering, and people you want your mouth all over, and it’s tempting to walk towards those distractions, to slice up your schedule a little bit more, and do 50 different things for ten minutes every day.
But let’s be clear: If you’re constantly trying to balance keeping up with all Kardashian shows, and going for your dreams, and volunteering at the local cat shelter, and eating more stuff that’s not beige, and exercising every day, and spending more time with your family, and working a 50 hour a week job, and trying to keep up with current events, and doing your taekwondo and keeping your awful yoga-based YouTube channel afloat, you will suck at literally everything you ever do ever.
You’ll get nowhere treating your life as a sampler platter. Instead, draft a few things from given areas to your Give a Shit Fantasy Team.
Add some laser focus into your life. Fuck balance. Get passionate. Get obsessive. Become a giant nerd for you things of choice.
This is why relationships can work. You stick to one person and you dead focus on them, and they therefore get the focus and time that most of us require (or become completely overwhelmed and order a restraining order–one of those).
If you have too many friends, if you have too many dreams, and if you have too many ideas, you’ll have-ass everything…or third-ass, or quarter-ass. No one deserves a quarter of an ass. Don’t do that to someone you care about.
Instead, give your full, fat ass to a few big things in your life.
So how do we decided what to dedicate our most valuable resource (time) to? What other positions do we include on our Give a Shit Fantasy Team?
Well, first we have to know the positions we’re picking. Those are as follows:
1) Causes (What we’ve discussed so far)
2) Big Life Priorities (The people, aspirations, and activities you choose to draft)
3) Stupid Bullshit (The things you waste your time on)
4) Things to Improve (Resolutions you have throughout the year)
Your causes can change as the world changes. If there are nukes flying over your head, you can probably bump Seasonal Affective Disorder off of your list of shit to worry about.
Point being, focus in on what you determine to be your causes. Get to know what causes them, develop ideas on how to fix them. Give them time and effort. Make sure your part of the world is better than it was before you came along.
And ignore other shit. Don’t read stories about sweatshops if you’re not deciding to care about that. Listen to how to vote from your friends who focus on sweatshops, and otherwise, follow your focuses. Stay locked in. Fix the fuck out of your corner.
For Life Priorities, you’re looking at following one real big aspiration, focusing in on your relationship, and getting rid of friends who might, say, talk a lot about how much they don’t like the Asians (just an idea).
Get focused on one direction, surround yourself with your army of people who don’t suck, and focus on the battles that you’ve decided on.
For the bullshit in your life, it might be time to reevaluate. We tend to indiscriminately pour bullshit onto our life like we’re children at a froyo place, and before we know it, we have lemon and caramel froyo with cookie dough, gummie worms, mango mochi, and peanuts on it, and our special treat tastes like diabetic garbage.
In other words, we tend to start a new dumb reality show, and then browse Instagram for hours, and then get addicted to an HGTV show, and then fantasize about romantic trips with future husbands (or boobs depending on your preference), and then spend 4 hours baking just so that our kitchen smells like warm cinnamon, and then watching dog videos, and we never think to pick a couple of things, and tone it the fuck down on everything else.
So it’s good to limit yourself and your bullshit activities. Think maybe two dumbass reality shows you watch a lot, a couple of stupid filler things like Instagram and sudoku, and a couple of stupid hobbies like PC games, or making your own erotic peanut butter sculptures. I don’t know. I don’t know how you like to spend your Saturday nights. The point is keep control of what your dumb shit will be, designate it, and go from there.
For Life Improvements, don’t try to improve everything at once. You won’t. You’ll fuck it up horribly, give up all hope, and end up a bigger loser than you are now. Pick a couple of things to focus on, and worry about NOTHING ELSE. Continue being a gross slob for a while if you first need to focus on quitting your habit of screaming obscenities at old people.
And with every decision you make, and everything you decide to cut, justify it. Make sense of your decisions, and the shit you no longer are bothering to give a shit about, and go from there.
Here’s a worksheet to help you get started.
So yes, this means you’ll have to lose some really awesome shit from your life. Prepare to tell the cats at the cat shelter to fuck off so that you can actually follow your dream.
Does it suck for the cats? Sure. Will some cats probably die? Okay, you probably don’t need to think about that, but yes. Some cats will die.
But your bigger aspirations and bigger relationships require you to zoom in on them. Find new ways to enjoy your hobbies. Find the little minute behaviors and habits that can really make a difference in succeeding towards your dreams. Find the little ways you can make your loved ones lives better that you wouldn’t have thought of while you were busy milking Peaches, the angry nursing Tabby.
Once you clear out the shit you don’t need, you’ll have way more time and energy to focus on the shit on your Team, and that is the only way you’ll make your life, and the world better.
So decide on what really matters, lose the rest, apologize to the orphans, and kick ass at your corner of life.
