How To Not Care About What Other People Think

P.C. Mae Mu

Hello Substack fam,

I have been in bed with the flu all week. Maybe it’s apt that this week I was going to write about how to not care about what other people think.

Because I’ve been too ill to write properly, I’ve decided to include a very shitty first draft of the article I was working on below. Talk about a raw write!

I love writing this newsletter. I dedicated myself to writing it in November 2022, and then religiously since August 2023 (I have not skipped a week!). One challenge I’ve been experiencing is that I do not always feel proud of what I publish here, because I feel the need to publish rather than take the time to write a longer and better piece. It’s a balance I’m working on, though for now, I appreciate the weekly cadence because it forces me to publish something.

So, here we go again!

Sending love, and I’m wishing you all good health and happiness out there,

Tash

💌 ✍️

Introduction

Quote Cindy Gallop from the Design Matters Podcast:

“A lot of people are living lives they don’t really want to be living. They’re doing things they don’t really want to be doing. They’re in relationships they don’t really want to be in, all because they care what other people think. You will never be truly happy if you care about what other people think.”

This is one of my favorite quotes of all time from the wonderful Cindy Gallop. Yes, we would all benefit from being a bit more contrarian and not caring about what other people think. But how can we do that?

I still care about what people think of me sometimes, but for the most part, I’m not phased. Even at 29, I’ve moved to a different country, quit my fancy tech job, and started writing spicey stories about my sex life. I quit a very lucrative life where I was miserable to try to be more happy. However, I still worry about what my immediate family thinks of me (whether they’re embarrassed about the work I do when it comes up in conversation over dinner with their friends). I also worry about gentrifying Mexico City and having local Mexicans hate me (it’s fair if they do). And I also worry that the type of work that I do might turn men off.

Feeling shame is a very normal emotion. As Brené Brown says, “Shame is the feeling that, if someone learned this about me, would I not be worthy of belonging?” Sometimes, when I’m writing an especially raunchy piece for no particular reason, I feel more shame. Why do I have to be so weird? Why am I putting my immediate family through this? It makes no sense.

How To Not Care: The Tips

1. Believe your happiness matters.

You’re never going to live your own life if you don’t believe that you deserve to be happy. You have to believe that your happiness matters, right now. Not some desired, imagined future where you get to be happy in retirement. This takes a level of selfishness and putting yourself first to say: it matters that I am happy in my life right now. You’re going to have to know what’s best for you because no one else will. Other people, even your parents, may be wrong about you and what you need to be happy.

2. Your parents are probably wrong.

I used to take what my mum said about me and my life very seriously. If we got into an argument, and she said, “You need to learn to put others first and be more generous,” I would completely internalize that. I genuinely believed that I was a bad person. But then, once I got some space from her, I realized that I love my mother, but I hardly agree with her about anything in this world. Hardly anything. I disagree with her political views. We have some of the same values, but not many. Why am I believing her when she says these things about me? Why am I letting someone else tell me who I am?

The truth is, I can’t control what she thinks of me, and we are two completely different people. Of course, you want your parents to be proud of you. And of course, you know their values and rules inside out, because you grew up with them, for Christ’s sake. But their opinions are only that: their opinions. And we are grown-ass adults with our own lives, our own personalities, and our own values.

3. Remember that your parents etc. will be dead soon.

Quite a dark thing to say, but it’s true. Why am I trying to live the life that my parents want for me when my life is my own and my parents won’t be around forever?

4. There is more than one kind of smart or intelligent person in the world.  

Back when I lived in New York, I had a full-time job in Data Analytics. I thought the only way to be a smart, respectable person was to work in tech or something science-y with statistics. We all have these legendary “mentors” or family friends that we look up to. For me, this was Barry Nix, a guy who used to work at Bear Sterns with my dad. Barry Nix is a real person. We all have a Barry Nix from our past: our successful uncle or neighbor or someone who made a lot of money who we looked up to, who praised a particular aspect of ourselves. But these people ultimately only present a very narrow definition of success. We can live our lives differently to them, and still be successful by our own definitions.

5. Cultivate weird friendships.

When I was working in tech, all my friends were tech people for the most part. And this made it difficult to think and live differently. In pursuing our weird interests, we have to surround ourselves more with people who also think differently. You need friends who reflect and accept the real values and aspirations that you have, not the kind of people who are just puppets and parrots for the lifestyle and way of life that you grew up with that you’re trying to individuate away from.

6. Meet new people.

When I began to seek out alternative people and lifestyles, I met spiritual guides and photographers, and indigenous nomadic shamans in Mexico who are dedicating their lives to holding peyote ceremonies for people to help them connect with their ancestors. I remember when I went to a peyote ceremony, the shamans had their five-year-old daughter sleeping in their tent with them. I spent a good ten minutes just thinking about how different my upbringing in a uniformed, buttoned-up all-girls private school in London might be compared to this girl who was growing up in the valleys of Oaxaca with her parents, keeping her traditions alive and speaking the indigenous languages of her ancestors. Pretty cool. There’s  not one right way to be raised.

7. Maya Angelou

Courage is the most important of all the virtues because, without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.

8. No more people pleasing.

Quote some literature from ACA. As adult children, we get guilt feelings when we stand up for ourselves because our feelings and needs were denied to us as children. Working this program has helped me to recover a sense of self-esteem.

9. Get stingy with your resources of time and money.

The cost of living is super expensive these days, so it’s important to know what you like and what you don’t like and live accordingly. For example, I know that I don’t enjoy skiing very much, so as much as I might want to prove to everyone who is seeing my Instagram photos that I’m wealthy and athletic and outdoorsy during the winter season, why not just save my money and be happy and find people in the #jomo (joy of missing out). We can practice and learn how to stand up for ourselves when we have a clear alternative for what will make us happier. For me, in this case, it’s not going skiing.  

10. Make impulsive decisions.

Don’t think about it too much. Don’t wonder or worry.

11. Analyze the role models in our culture.

It’s good to be ambitious and have dreams and goals. Still, if we don’t have our own definition of success, we’ll quickly absorb the ideals of our capitalist society. Our society is shallow, putting women on pedestals for their looks, and industries like beauty and anti-aging and weird things keep money lining the pockets of some very questionable people. A lot of powerful people in this world are just exploiting others. So before we define our success as something external, intermingled with the messed-up ideals of our society, we need to define success on our own terms, and that will make it a lot easier for us not to care about what other people think.