The Less You Care, The Happier You’ll Be | Taoist Wisdom For An Overly Serious World

A lot of what friend Einzelgänger says in these 13 minutes is obvious truism, and yet there’s still a whole lot to unpack to my eye.

The Less You Care, The Happier You Will Be. Is that true? In essence yes, I think so.

Does that mean that the proper path for a human life is caring less and less until we stop caring at all?

I’m far less certain of that, far less ready to commit to it.

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One phrase that jumped out at me while watching was “self-exploitation”. That is what we obsessively do most of the time, right?

But what if any one of us were useless, and thus without anything in our selves to exploit, ending the vicious cycle?

I don’t mind being poor nearly as much as I minded having to do all those ugly boring things required in order to be comfortable or ‘middle-class’.

My life is not problem-free.

I am not always (or even often) “happy”.

But this is, still, better.

In a sense I choose when to stop caring and be happy, and when to care passionately and thus be inevitably miserable.

As in the earlier post: going off into a brain-dead bliss while shooting up or snorting an old movie with only token attempts to critically analyze its message …

and then turning around to face the stupidity and evil in the Way we’ve chosen, and in some cases have been forced, to live, and becoming enraged by it, or scared of it, or profoundly sad about it, or all of those things at once.

I wouldn’t have nearly that much flexibility, or that many options if I was trying to hold down a job and be a useful and productive self-exploiting member of that very same broken society.

Or if I had a bunch of kids to raise instead of a few random cats …

Or if I was doing what it takes to be able to afford to drive a shiny new problem-free pickup truck, instead of a lovely old piece of cranky shit.

So I have intuitively (not-rationally) decided to become a lovely old piece of cranky shit myself.

I am living the life of a useless tree.

I am always striving after being honest about how I feel about that fact.

With reasonably authentic self-examined clarity I conclude that in the present moment

I’m fine with it.