idontcareidontcareidontcare

I don't think or care about what others think of me, maybe with the exception of a handful of people that are important to me, at most. Anything else is just teenage stuff.

Yeah, no.

Your life is so dependent on what others think of you I can't even start to describe it. Your whole world would fall apart if you couldn't communicate normalcy and intention through gestures, customs, established behavior, a painfully curated speech. You depend on what your clients and providers assume of your lawfulness. You depend on not being perceived as creepy or strange by passersby and loved ones. Of course you care, your life depends on it. There is an endless list of small adjustments in your tone, the movement of your feet, distance between people, orientation of your face while you wait in line in a supermarket that communicate more than you could talk about in a lifetime that aren't casual; all this is not decided but learned, by trial and error, mirror neurons and cultural assimilation. And it's not devoid of "content" by any stretch of the imagination —is precisely the collective of those gestures and movements what contains (or is derived from) most of the cultural and ideological information you are; much more than any rationally constructed though and personality.

More than not caring about others think of you, is almost as if you have already defined and integrated a particular set of personal identities (intersectional solutions to common social problems) inside the internalized social culture that surrounds them, and now you have no incentive to think consciously about the problem anymore —so you don't. But to affirm that has no effect or importance to you... my god; you construct your whole life around the idea of acceptability and moral shared values. How do you then explain that the overwhelming majority of your actions are not only accepted, but normal in the incredibly narrow scope on your particular zeitgeist (which is not that tolerant with divergence and much more defined and specific as we think it is)? What other reasons are there than explain why the ways you express your individuality bound by symbolic expressions to be understood by others, your art and appearance (that so come "from within") communicated through the understandable canons of preexisting tokens of expression? What an amazing coincidence, isn't it? It's almost as if you constructed your individuality bouncing around it's inner walls, being corrected every time you got a scratch, and now you proudly proclaim that the result is of your own invention and the result of your own unique personal journey. The obvious explanation is that you fucking care about what others think, but you shield from it in preconstructed packages and delusion, because admitting it would hurt your ego and make you think of something that was in your developmental process "already solved".

The only other explanation is that our behavior is normal because emerges logically from the correct normal ideology, which is even more narrow-minded, a form of cultural and temporal chauvinism.

So internalized we have it that "correct" behavior that makes us acceptable is not even "decided", it comes naturally, makes sense, deviance makes us feel an abject and irrational disgust even when we cant explain it (although we try, the most obvious being classism and racism, but that's just a posterization of a much more granulated phenomena).

We have limited the options for inadequacy (and the potential consequences of bad choices therein) by linking individuality to function and archetype, any inadequacy or wrongdoing cant then be pointed at the perpetrator but instead to the whole group, where we shield into the tribal logic and crowdfund defense of acceptability. Entire collections of small rituals and in-world traditions, where protected function serves as a counterbalance for potential imbalance. And you can be like "well yeah of course your environment and culture influences you of course this is not a groundbreaking discovery". No. You don't understand. It doesn't "influence you", it's the substrate itself from which the phenomenon of behavior and being emerges from. There's a reason to why the best possible way to predict someone's behavior (apart of previous one) are not personality, moral or intellectual values but age, country, occupation and gender. In that order. And if all this is about the whole "I just don't think consciously about this stuff" what can I say, I though we were over this.

You are not liberated, you are just dumb. The only real possible liberation from reality there is.

And I'm just jealous.

Selectively dumb so you can function. Which is pretty smart thing to do. So you can focus your analytical prowess in less holistic and more directly useful problems. I get it. It is me who can't let go. You can "choose to perform as if". Which is not so different from it being, specially if you forget that you're doing it. As a temporal measure "I don't care what others think" can be quite useful, like for example when learning something or when exploring possibilities of being that are not reachable by usual gradient. That's why we allow it to teenagers, even when evidently false. But c'mon. The phase of thinking you are not that sixteen year old dipshit that knew nothing and you must distance yourself from is over.

Even the smallest of the things you do, even the morphology of your face reeks of social interaction and content. Your limbic system cares, therefore you care. We have the eyes we do, with the white space and the visible iris (unlike for example orangutans) because that serves a social function of clarity of your intentions, with is advantageous in tribal societies. The showing of emotions, tears, yawns, posture, smiles. You thing there's a purely biological functional reason for those things? Expression is not an aesthetic axiom of reality. They exist to communicate intent, internal state, they are made to be perceived by others and elicit a response or a change in behavior. You live and die because of that stuff. And you could say, "well but the unconscious perception and reaction of emotions and social cues is a separate thing from caring about others think" and that where you are wrong; you cannot separate the aggregate of micro-stimuli from the overarching behavior itself; it's a product of that. Feelings like guilt, disgust (in the social sense) pride; they are deeply social, not only depending on the individual, but also to even higher constructs like family structure and political ideology. Even when you are by yourself, in your house, in front of a mirror; how you perceive yourself (even when not thinking about others) is dependent on how an almost transcendental "others" would perceive you, you yourself are a "transcendental other" and your aspect and style and clothes are interpreted in the symbolic language of the culture you are immersed into.

The funny thing is, who you are is not even relevant anymore. You are your function and have your instructions and your social identity derives from that, but it has no direct implication how creative, aggressive, perfectionist or whatever you actually are. Because unless you have a job in a cutting edge area everything is figured out and you have to punch the hours and it's your own problem how and nobody will tell the difference in the industrialized commodity it is you help produce. That makes exaggerated purely social forms of identity even more important, because they have to hide the fact that what they simulate doesn't exist anymore. It's an arms race out there. But because there's no real reference to actual content, the symbols we use are interchangeble —and do change, constantly. Everything is everything all at once, and the only difference between praise and ostracism (or worse, indifference) is the presence or absence of intention in your acts and presence. Intention goes around and around in circles of things we don't admit to ourselves that hide deeper motives but those are actually just rationalizations. It goes on and on and on and never ends and nobody does anything for any particular reason. So all personal characteristic coexists as a performance of what it is supposed to represent in the particular cultural context (and nothing out of it) and an ironic effortless nihilistic detached performance about that particular thing and also all the other things in the world. Which is obviously paradoxical, but not as much as the fact that not thinking about what others think of you is so important to your need for external and internal validation; which causes a loop in the cringe-based continuum of the universe. And none of it is (from the point of view of the youth) even linked to any idea of authenticity. His non-existence is taken as a given with a shocking indifference I preach about but can't possibly reenact myself.