Who cares and why does it matter?

[Someone here]

Would i be a better person if I cared more about more things?
Is caring an essential mindset for survival?
Where would I even start?
Do I even know what it means to care?
My mom  often tells me I don’t care, especially about the things she cares about. I agree. I don’t care. I’m not fussed about keeping a clean house. It doesn’t bother me what I wear when I go to the shops, I only don't throw trash on the main street because there’s a council bi-law that says I should care.
Which brings me to the final point :

 should we act caringly if we don’t care? I don’t care about my siblings yet I’m told I should and demonstrate that caring to them. I could only align that with being nice to a great white shark.

How does caring fit with your current philosophy?

[Carl-Richard]

Do you feel that you are able to listen to your conscience?

[Yarco]

Just increasing caring in general doesn't help. It has to be directed at something that's meaningful to you.

The reason you don't care about the same things as your mom is because you have a different set of values. Those things are very important to her, but you don't see why it's important.

Between different generations, there's often a gap in what people value and care about.

Lots of things in life are actively harmful to care about. Someone might be a religious zealot and constantly tell you that you should care about religion or you'll go to hell. Or your friend might be a racist and think it's important to care about oppressing other races, and tell you that you should care more or else your race will be replaced. That doesn't mean you should blindly care about those things.

Try to think if there's any logic behind the things she cares about, or ask her why it's important to her if you can't figure it out. For example, she might care about keeping a clean house to prevent mice and insects inside. Other things like what you wear to the shops, her reason might just be "people will look at you funny / think less of you" and then it's not something you need to care about.

[Someone here]

1 hour ago, Carl-Richard said:

Do you feel that you are able to listen to your conscience?

Do you mean intuition rather? 

1 hour ago, Yarco said:

Just increasing caring in general doesn't help. It has to be directed at something that's meaningful to you.

The reason you don't care about the same things as your mom is because you have a different set of values. Those things are very important to her, but you don't see why it's important.

Between different generations, there's often a gap in what people value and care about.

Lots of things in life are actively harmful to care about. Someone might be a religious zealot and constantly tell you that you should care about religion or you'll go to hell. Or your friend might be a racist and think it's important to care about oppressing other races, and tell you that you should care more or else your race will be replaced. That doesn't mean you should blindly care about those things.

Try to think if there's any logic behind the things she cares about, or ask her why it's important to her if you can't figure it out. For example, she might care about keeping a clean house to prevent mice and insects inside. Other things like what you wear to the shops, her reason might just be "people will look at you funny / think less of you" and then it's not something you need to care about.

Is it weird that I just don't care?

Like everyone I now could die and I wouldn't care shit what  happens to me .. I feel nothing except maybe bordem when I hang out with family and friends.  My family was never mean to me. The only reason I've tolerated their obsessing  with laundry and whatnot cuz I feel like I'm suppose to and the other people always ask me out. I'm honestly happiest when I'm at home doing my own thing.

[Carl-Richard]

3 minutes ago, Someone here said:

Do you mean intuition rather? 

No, I mean your conscience: the inner voice that tells you what is the best thing to do in a given situation. It's what makes conscientious people conscientious.

Edited November 7, 2022 by Carl-Richard

[Someone here]

5 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

No, I mean your conscience: the inner voice that tells you what is the best thing to do in a given situation. It's what makes conscientious people conscientious.

No . I'm a bit all over the place lately.  Very confused about big life descions that I have to make (career wise ). And also I'm getting older (I'm 26 now ) and still have not had my shit together. My health sucks because of the fucking cigarettes and my conscience is shit .

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, Someone here said:

No . I'm a bit all over the place lately.  Very confused about big life descions that I have to make (career wise ). And also I'm getting older (I'm 26 now ) and still have not had my shit together. My health sucks because of the fucking cigarettes and my conscience is shit .

Obeying your conscience makes you care more. Speaking as an ex- drug addict who played hide-and-seek with his conscience for 3 years.

Edited November 7, 2022 by Carl-Richard

[Someone here]

33 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

Obeying your conscience makes you care more. Speaking as an ex- drug addict who played hide-and-seek with his conscience for 3 years.

Could you share which drug you were addicted to ? And how did you recover ?

....And i thought that my cigarettes addiction was a big deal lol. Props to you man for overcoming a drug addiction....

Its common in Western world both, alcohol and drugs. And I had to go out of my way to find some fine wine in India ,but I  have not developed dependency to it. some people suffer and develop dependency. I'm glad I didn't.  

[Carl-Richard]

38 minutes ago, Someone here said:

Could you share which drug you were addicted to ? And how did you recover ?

Weed. My recovery was mainly due to my spiritual awakening. It changed how I experience all hedonistic pleasures. They're literally less enjoyable and literally feel empty. I remember making a frozen pizza like I've always done, and when I bit into it, I didn't get that same rush of "hell yeah – pizza!", and I was actually shocked over how profound it was. Same thing happened when I tried weed again a month later. It was just very empty and hugely anti-climactic. But despite that, I actually forced myself back into the habit, because the habit was safe and comfortable. However, when I actually did end up quitting for real a year later, it didn't have the same grip on me, so I could let go of it easier.

While the high itself is one factor, in the bigger picture, it wasn't really the high that was driving the addiction. I used it as an escape from my surroundings which had caused me a lot of stress and existential despair for many years. I had very much anxiety around everything; people, school, my future; and when I found weed, I was given an escape. The way out of that escape was first of all thanks to my mother who didn't give up on me and forced me to give school another shot, Leo's channel who initiated my awakening, and some old spirituality discord which was coincidentally anti-drugs.

Edited November 7, 2022 by Carl-Richard

[Someone here]

33 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

Weed. My recovery was mainly due to my spiritual awakening. It changed how I experience all hedonistic pleasures. They're literally less enjoyable and literally feel empty. I remember making a frozen pizza like I've always done, and when I bit into it, I didn't get that same rush of "hell yeah – pizza!", and I was actually shocked over how profound it was. Same thing happened when I tried weed again a month later. It was just very empty and hugely anti-climactic. But despite that, I actually forced myself back into the habit, because the habit was safe and comfortable. However, when I actually did end up quitting for real a year later, it didn't have the same grip on me, so I could let go of it easier.

While the high itself is one factor, in the bigger picture, it wasn't really the high that was driving the addiction. I used it as an escape from my surroundings which had caused me a lot of stress and existential despair for many years. I had very much anxiety around everything; people, school, my future; and when I found weed, I was given an escape. The way out of that escape was first of all thanks to my mother who didn't give up on me and forced me to give school another shot, Leo's channel who initiated my awakening, and some old spirituality discord which was coincidentally anti-drugs.

I'm happy for you bro. Weed seems to be a very addictive substance. I never tried it .but I'd like to .unfortunately (and saying this for the 100th time lol) it's banned in India.
I don't know how addicted you were..it takes years to recover and get your body healthy and sometimes it's irreversible because you waited until it was to late. Diet and exercise and lots of water and vitamins help. 

Im actually using growth hormone pills to help heal damaged lungs  from my  cigarettes overdoses .and it seemed to work wonders.

Good luck and stay sober
it's not worth the nightmare to get high and crash like a fuckin airplane.

[caspex]

What you care about reflects who you are. In the sense of what you value. 

First you need to be radically authentic and find out what you really care about and what you don't.
Pro Tip: Being numb, ignorant, or scared of something doesn't mean you don't care.

Now, once you know what you care about you should have a good idea of how developed you really are. So now you need to look at and guess what value systems people more developed than you hold. That's tricky because you need to discern between their personal values and values that comes with that level of development(which is what you are looking for). Also it's your current values which determine who's more developed and who isn't, so yeah. It's very tricky.

My advice: Observe diverse models of development and pick out what's common, what makes sense, and try to find contradictions.

You can also use this perspective to become anyone you want, as long as you know most of what they care about. (Which even they don't)

Edited November 8, 2022 by Swarnim

[Carl-Richard]

@Someone here I had an interesting dream last night which is very likely related to this. First some backstory:

One of my roommates last year (who I no longer live with) was at that time a very disorganized stoner in the midst of a downward spiral, extremely similar to me back when I was very much a drug addict. He was smoking weed 24/7, stopped going to his job, and started getting into benzodiazepines (which I did a little bit but which wasn't a central part of my story). Now a few months later, after moving to a new place with one of my current roommates who also lived at that old place, this current roommate told me that the guy has started taking heroin after his girlfriend broke up with him, and that he has been in and out of rehab trying to sell drugs to the guys in there (like fucking Jesse Pinkman).

 

The dream

Anyways, so the dream consisted of this guy being with me, my mom and my little brother in my mom's dining room. We had set the table and were ready to eat. My mom and my brother were sitting at the table and I was about to sit down. I was looking at the guy, telling him: "come, it's time to eat!", but he was just standing there a bit further away from us, staring at us with a distraught look on his face. Then he was overcome by some kind of suicidal rage, picked up a kitchen knife and started stabbing himself violently in the gut. We were all just staring in disbelief as he continued stabbing himself. The thing was that the knife was for some reason very dull, so it didn't really do much. As he noticed the failure of his efforts, he instead tried to slit his wrists, but that didn't work either. I then tried to grab the knife from him and eventually pinned him to the ground and started beating the living shit out of him to get him to drop the knife. Finally he did, and after that, I spent the next part of the dream on the run frantically trying to avoid him, as he was hunting me down trying to kill me.

 

Interpretation

One way to interpret this dream is that he represented a version of me that didn't make the transition out of the downwards spiral, and that him doing everything he could to hurt himself right in front of my family was a symbol of how the downward spiral consists of you constantly hurting yourself while your family is watching you in disbelief without knowing what to do. Me having to attack and disarm myself symbolizes how it's ultimately only me who can stop hurting myself. And finally, me spending the next parts of the dream trying to avoid myself symbolizes how I'm still trying to avoid that aspect of myself to this day. Also, I felt that the distraught look on his face came from a feeling of jealousy, of how this current version of myself is now absolutely loved by my family, while he was getting all these looks of concern and pity, this pathetic drug addict in front of them who is not able to come to the table.

Edited November 8, 2022 by Carl-Richard