I don’t know if people still use this site/blog, but I keep getting way too many emails clogging up my inbox over comments on articles written while I was in 8th grade. Anyways, I figured I might as well interact with the site again (might be able to put it on my college resume, so that’s a plus). Here’s the first essay I wrote for English this school year. Feel free to criticize it, applaud it, etc.
English II-P4
23 August 2021
Why I Don’t Give a Damn
Despite the plethora of self-help books that profess how they’ll make you stop caring about the minuscule, inconsequential worries of life, I’m going to attempt to oversimplify the shit out of this. I truly believe that I have accomplished the “art” of not giving a damn by understanding your goals and being honest with what you care about.
“All great actions have a plan,” is what I’d say to be a pretentious, pseudo-intellectual prick, but I must say that having an outline is essential. Looking past the pathetic introduction, setting goals on what you want to achieve by not giving a shit and knowing what you don’t want to give a shit about is crucial; basically, you need to know your target to hit it. In my case, I looked back at myself and actions and thought, “hmph, get a load of this asswipe,” and decided that I wanted to not be afraid nor embarrassed to do what makes me comfortable and happy. As a result, I decided to embrace hedonism and stop spending time with people I didn’t desire to, prioritize the activities I craved to do, quit actions that I felt were an attempt to prove myself to others, and shifted my behaviours to reflect the person I envisioned I could be.
Setting goals is great and all, but that’s just the surface… the true difficulty is organizing your priorities and being honest to yourself. The reality is that our aspirations are often only belittled by ourselves and by coming to terms with one’s shortcomings is the tallest hurdle. If you have ever been brushing your teeth before sleeping and peeked over at the pristine, neglected floss you bought millenia ago and told yourself, “just one more night of not flossing won’t hurt,” then you are a goddamn, two-faced liar to yourself (and probably your dentist). To truly stop giving a damn, I had to take a knife and mutilate that voice in my head telling me “just put it off” or “it’s not a big deal” till Jeffrey Dahmer would recoil in horror, and I can say that I am better for it. Once I managed this, I spent copious lengths of time and was able to reorganize my priorities and goals in order for myself to truly believe in myself and commit to the new path I wished to venture on.
Ultimately, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and your behaviour and demeanor won’t either, but by coming to terms with myself and reasoning out what exactly I wanted to change enabled myself to, frankly, not give a damn.
