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Zero Fucks Given

Avery
December 4, 2015

The guy who gives zero fucks is the guy other men want to be and women want to be with. Everything he does disproportionately draws the attention of others. People imitate him not because heâs perfect, but because heâs comfortable with his imperfection.

 

Women want to be with him not because heâs unusually attractive but because he does not care whether women find him attractive. Others believe in him because he believes in himself. Other people call him confident, charismatic, and charming, not because he has some measurable quality that others donât, but because everything he does reflects how little he worries about others âopinions. Some people hate him, but he doesnât waste his time, energy, or emotion on those people.

 

He is free in all the ways everyone else isnât, and we all envy what we falsely assume is his innate social superiority to most others.

 

If there is one thing that weighs us down in our social (and professional) lives, it is caring what other people think, and it has so much power over us because weâre afraid to admit how neurotic and obsessive we look to others for our own self-worth. Nearly everyone cares way too much, and itâs easy to see in other people.

 

You can see that your friend cares so much about whether his crush likes him back that he wonât ask her out. You can tell that your other friend is afraid to be free-spirited, and puts on a serious front because heâs afraid that people wonât approve of his genuine, goofy personality. Itâs easy to see that your parents try to control you because they define their self-worth on your success (a success that they define).

 

We can tell that many people are so afraid of their faults that they wonât admit they exist, but can we see these kinds of behaviors in ourselves? Is it possible that we have a blindspot to accurately seeing our own flaws, that we have trouble admitting our own obsessive need to be approved by others? Might we be blind to our own blindness?

 

I think thereâs strong evidence that most of us are, and that until we become aware of this, our efforts to improve our social lives are being built on a house of cards, we canât become more socially confident until we accept the beliefs we donât know we have that are making us act and feel so insecure. The aim of this article is to prove this.

 

I’m Jack’s Need to Belong

 

Tyler Durden from Fight Club is the cultural icon for giving zero fucks. He genuinely did not care what anyone else thought, and because of this he had no desire to be nice, appropriate, or agreeable.

 

He laughed at what most people feared and he was so unafraid of social rejection and so at ease with his own imperfections that people admired him, even worshiped him.

 

Even though he is a fictional character that ran underground fight clubs (sorry for talking about it, but to be fair, everyone breaks the first rule), his character was so magnetically appealing that people in the real world started actual fight clubs based on the movie. Eight years after the movieâs release a fight club got started at my high school due to my best friendâs admiration for Tyler Durden and what he represented.

And what did this sociopathic cult-leader who didnât care about anything, including himself represent? He put it best himself, when speaking to the narrator of the movie he said, âAll the ways you wish you could be, thatâs me. I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways you are not.â

 

Tyler Durden became a cultural icon because he represented total social and personal freedom, a freedom most of us envy, because deep down, we know we donât have it. We care too fucking much about the opinion of others.

 

Weâve all been fed more than a decadeâs worth of bullshit beliefs and values about whatâs important and how we should act. Because we were fed these beliefs in our formative years, weâve accepted these beliefs as our own because not to do so would put us at war with ourselves. Letâs expose that bullshit which is unconsciously choking our ability to interact with others as our most genuine and charismatic selves.

 

Weâve all known a few of those guys who just donât care what other people think, and secretly or not, we wish we had what they have (and many people pretend to not care to show that they do have this). Thereâs nothing terribly special about these guys that are envied, they just have a mindset that allows them to have deep confidence in themselves.

 

The Power of Mindset

 

Most self-improvement advice focus on the external, this makes sense because all we can observe is the external. If you want to be more charismatic, a book might teach you how to make good eye contact, that tone of voice to speak with, or how to power-pose to exude confidence.

 

There is some truth to this flavor of advice, strong eye contact and open body language do show confidence. But, having put years and thousands of hours of conscious effort into a medley of these techniques and âtricksâ to build confidence, I can say theyâre not very effective, and even miss the point entirely.

 

There are a few problems with this kind of practical advice, firstly, to make a change like this stick, you have to practice long enough to make it into an automatic habit, and in most cases, that just isnât going to happen. Recent research has shown that it takes 66 days of conscious effort to make a new habit. Are you going to consciously practice a new type of body language for 66 days? Does anyone actually do this? Itâs extremely unlikely, it takes too much faith and discipline.

 

Even worse, in the process of learning this technique, youâre going to appear and even feel less confident before you reap its social benefits. The act of monitoring your body language is bringing your attention to the fact that you donât like your body language, and that you need to fix it to come across the way you want to come across.

 

But thereâs an even worse limitation to this kind of advice. We attribute charisma and confidence to the external symptoms, things we can see, like someoneâs body language, how a person talks, how they listen, and their eye contact. But what really makes them different isnât something you can see, itâs something that is completely invisible, itâs their mindset.

 

The lens someone with deep confidence see the world through is qualitatively different than the lens most people see the world through. Itâs because of that lens that these people naturally act in more visibly confident ways. External traits like word choice, body language, and the quality of your voice are the tip of the iceberg, theyâre the 1% of confidence that you can see with your eyes, but the vast majority of what makes people who are deeply self-confident different is what lay beneath the surface. The external attributes are the symptoms of confidence, the mindset is the cause.

 

Do you think people who are extremely self-confident, who donât give a fuck what anyone else thinks are worried about their body language or the tone of the voice? No, they donât even consider things like this worthy of their attention. They are so confident BECAUSE they donât monitor themselves, because they donât feel their external behaviors are lacking in any way. They believe theyâre already good enough, and because of this, they act in ways that appear confident.

 

Scientific research on mindsets has found that a simple mindset intervention can make changes that last a lifetime. In one study, psychologist Jeremy Jamieson tested the power of mindset. He split students into two groups (which were randomly assigned/controlled for GPA and SAT scores) and gave the first group a mindset intervention to change their minds about test anxiety before having them take a practice standardized test.

 

The intervention was a simple lecture in which Jamieson showed the students evidence that test anxiety wasnât a bad thing. And that in fact, research has shown high stress-levels can improve performance, therefore you shouldnât resist test anxiety, but embrace it, it can actually help you.

 

Jamieson hoped that this message would boost studentsâ performance, and it worked, students in the mindset intervention group performed significantly better on the test than did the other students who received no lecture.

 

Over the next several months, the students took the GRE and sent their scores to Jamiesonâs team, not only did students who received the mindset intervention do better than those who did not, the difference in scores was larger than it had been with the practice test. Implying that the effect had grown stronger over time.

 

I know this sounds too good to be true, I thought the same thing when I first learned about mindset interventions, but that study is one of hundreds of studies that have shown the uncanny power of mindset, and that have shown they can easily be changed.

 

In a 1998 study, 30,000 American adults were asked how much stress they experienced the past year and whether they believed stress was harmful. Those who had a high amount of stress over the past year and believed that stress was harmful had a 43% higher of dying than those who didnât believe stress was harmful. Even more shockingly, those who had high levels of stress, but believed stress was not harmful were less likely to die over the next eight years than those who had relatively low levels of stress, but believed that stress was harmful. In short, your mindset about stress affects the physical impact that stress has on you, to the point where it significantly affects your chance of dying over the next eight years.

 

In another study, researcher Alia Crum found that simply being told that housework is a good form of exercise reduced maidsâ body fat percentage and blood pressure significantly compared to maids that were not told this.

 

This is just scratching the surface of mindset research, but what itâs found is that meaningful, lasting change can be facilitated through a simple mindset intervention that takes as few as five minutes to complete. Psychologists have found, time and time again, that our real-world outcomes are determined by unconscious mindsets, beliefs that in many cases we arenât even aware we have.

 

Most people have mindsets that cause them to act in unconfident and often neurotic ways. Youâre not afraid to approach a girl because you didnât do a power pose to boost your confidence, youâre afraid to approach a girl because of beliefs you have about yourself that feel real because youâve had them for years.

 

Change your belief systems, and the rest will take care of itself over time. This doesnât mean change is easy, it takes a lot of honest self-reflection and requires you to develop an ability to question your most deeply rooted assumptions about yourself.

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Post Information
Title Zero Fucks Given
Author Avery
Date December 4, 2015 7:44 PM UTC (8 years ago)
Blog Red Pill Theory
Archive Link https://theredarchive.com/blog/Red-Pill-Theory/zero-fucks-given.22763
https://theredarchive.com/blog/22763
Original Link https://redpilltheory.com/2015/12/04/zero-fucks-given/
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