DON’T WORRY. NO ONE CARES
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听力版：https://www.bilibili.com/audio/au3946469?type=1?type=6
英文听力文本：
DON’T WORRY. NO ONE CARES
We tend to begin our lives with a deeply unrepresentative experience: that of being surrounded by people who care to an extraordinary extent about us. We look up from the dreams and confusions of early infancy and may find a smiling face or two observing us with the utmost tenderness and concern. They watch us as a rivulet of saliva leaks slowly from the corner of our mouth and rush to wipe it away as if dabbing at a precious canvas, then indulgently stroke the fine soft hairs on our delicate scalps. They declare us close to supernatural when, at last, we succeed in pulling our first smile. The applause rings for days when we take our initial steps, giggle, totter, fall, and bravely try to resume our progress.
It isn’t just at home. At school, the best teachers encourage us when we find something difficult; they understand we might be shy; they’re keen to detect and encourage the early, tentative signs of our particular talents. Then, of course, we grow up and we’re inducted into a horrific reality: we exist in a world of astonishing indifference to almost everything we are, think, say or do. We might be in late adolescence when the point really hits home. We might be in a bedsit at university or wandering the streets of the city at night on our own – when it occurs to us, with full force, how negligible a thing we are in the wider scheme. No one in the crowds we pass knows anything about us. Our welfare is of no concern to them. They jostle against us on the pavements and treat us as a mere impediment to their progress. We’re tiny against the towers and brightly-lit flashing advertising hoardings. We might die and no one would even notice.
It may be a stern truth – but we make it all the more so by focusing only on its darkest dimensions. We remain grief-stricken by how invisible we are, yet we cease to put this bracing thought to its proper philosophical purpose, that of rescuing us from another problem which is gnawing at us all the while: an ongoing and highly corrosive sense of self-consciousness.
In another side of our minds, we haven’t accepted the indifference of others at all, in fact, we know, and suffer intensely, from just how much (as we feel sure) others are thinking of us. We’re extremely worried about how high-pitched and odd our voice sounded when we asked the waiter for a bit more milk. We’re certain that the sales attendant noticed how out of shape our stomach is. The people in the restaurant where we’re eating alone are undoubtedly spending considerable time wondering why we have no friends. At work, they’re still dwelling on that slightly stupid thing we said last month about the US sales strategy. A person we went to bed with four years ago is to this day thinking ill of us in some powerful but undefined way.
We don’t really have any evidence for this, and yet it can feel like an emotional certainty. It can feel intuitively clear that our foolishness and less-than-impressive sides are being noted and dwelt on all the time by everyone at large. Every way in which we depart from what the world considers to be normal, upstanding and dignified has been registered by the widest constituency.
To liberate us from this kind of punitive story, we may need to conduct a deliberately artificial thought-exercise; we may have to set ourselves the challenge of examining how long we spend on the foolishness (or just existence) of other people. How we think and feel about other people we don’t particularly know is perhaps the best guide to the workings of the average human imagination: to pretty much the rest of the world, we are the very same sort of strangers or casual acquaintances as we know and deal with in our own daily experience.
And now here, the results can be surprising. Imagine that we’re in an elevator, standing next to someone on our way to the 20th floor. They think they know that we disapprove of their choice of jacket. They think they know that we should have picked another one and that they look silly and pinched in this one. But in reality, we haven’t noticed the jacket. In fact, we haven’t noticed they were born – or that one day they are going to die. We’re just worrying about how our partner responded when we mentioned our mother’s cold to them last night. Or imagine it’s well on the way into the last bit of a two-hour meeting that we sense that a colleague’s hair really is a bit different today, though we can’t quite put a finger on how – even though they spent a small fortune on their cut and thought intensely about the wisdom of visiting a new salon.
In other words, when we take our own minds as a guide, we get a far more accurate – and far less oppressive – vision of what’s likely to be going on the heads of other people when they encounter us, which is, in the nicest way, not very much.
This kind of news is both very bad and strangely good: on the one hand, no one may notice when we die; on the other, they are also sure not to have noticed when we spill some orange juice on our front or do our hair the wrong way.
It’s not that we – or they – are horrible. Our lack of caring isn’t absolute. If we really saw a stranger in trouble in the water, we would dive in. When a friend is in tears, we are sympathetic. It’s just that for the most part, we need to filter. Our everyday lack of care occurs for a perfectly sane and forgivable reason: we need to spend most of our waking energies on navigating, and doing justice to, our own intimate concerns. Once we’ve had to think about our relationship, our career, our finances, our health, our close relatives, our offspring, our upcoming holidays, our friends and the state of our household, there is just going to be very little time left to reflect on the suddenly high-pitched voice of a customer or the outfit of a colleague.
We are owed the upside of an otherwise tragic insight. We shouldn’t just suffer from the indifference of other people, we should – where it matters – properly reciprocate it. We shouldn’t merely suffer from being ignored, we should accept the liberation implicit in the fact that we are being so. And then, in turn, we should embark more courageously on those situations and adventures where a touch of foolishness is always going to be a possibility, like the start of a new business, a romantic invitation, or asking a question at a conference…We may fail, but we can believe with new certainty that almost no one will give a damn if we do, an idea that may – above anything else – help to contribute to our future success – something which, as we now know, no one is going to much notice or care about anyway.
