Read the whole thing, but this gets to the heart of it. (Edited because we don’t need to use the “New Jersey comma” at this blog to make our point.)
Eric Hoffer once wrote: “A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.” [Emphasis added]
The problem with people who hand out [fracks] like ice cream at a [gorram] summer camp is that they don’t have anything more [frack]worthy to dedicate their [fracks] to.
Think for a second. You’re at a grocery store. And there’s an elderly lady screaming at the cashier, berating him for not accepting her 30-cent coupon. Why does this lady give a [frack]? It’s just 30 cents.
Well, I’ll tell you why. That old lady probably doesn’t have anything better to do with her days than to sit at home cutting out coupons all morning. She’s old and lonely. Her kids are dickheads and never visit. She hasn’t had sex in over 30 years. Her pension is on its last legs and she’s probably going to die in a diaper thinking she’s in Candyland. She can’t fart without extreme lower back pain. She can’t even watch TV for more than 15 minutes without falling asleep or forgetting the main plotline.
So she snips coupons. That’s all she’s got. It’s her and her damn coupons. All day, every day. It’s all she can give a [frack] about because there is nothing else to give a [frack] about. And so when that pimply-faced 17-year-old cashier refuses to accept one of them, when he defends his cash register’s purity the way knights used to defend maidens’ virginities, you can damn well bet granny is going to erupt and verbally hulk smash his fucking face in. Eighty years of [fracks] will rain down all at once, like a fiery hailstorm of “Back in my day” and “People used to show more respect” stories, boring the world around her to tears in her creaking and wobbly voice.
If you find yourself consistently giving too many [fracks] about trivial shit that bothers you — your ex-girlfriend’s new Facebook picture, how quickly the batteries die in the TV remote, missing out on yet another 2-for-1 sale on hand sanitizer — chances are you don’t have much going on in your life to give a legitimate [frack] about. And that’s your real problem. Not the hand sanitizer.
This guy’s written a whole book, pages and pages of that dreck? Oh my.
Point well made. Reading the whole thing can help drive home the overall point that apathy is actually an active stance / decision. It’s something that I’ve been working to embrace more over the past few weeks.
Side note: missed one (Paragraph 5, Line 7).
I think there’s a difference between apathy and giving-too-many-farks. A lot of the rise of totalitarian governments (before and after 1930s Germany) can be chalked up to an excess of apathy. The other extreme is an overemphasis on every matter which offends. This is the hallmark of most of the left in modern society, though it used to occur with more frequency on the right as well.
I saw a news story about a 104-year-old woman who is going to the Women’s March in DC next weekend. The report mentioned about how she had always been politically/civically active and noted her desire to support women’s rights because it’s needed “now more than ever”. That’s a metaphor for “giving too many farks”. Is your life otherwise so empty at 100+ years of age that you will participate in a virtue signaling activity which will do no good other than to be seen as a temper tantrum? I can understand the need to get out of the house and such, but if I were able, I know I’d sure rather visit a museum I hadn’t seen or a park I’ve not been to than to participate in a stompy-foot exercise.
Sadly, there are too many who will spend their last days not protesting actual injustice but imaginary demons who won’t matter one whit in the grand scheme of things.